
Collection Online as of December 4, 2023
(Belgian, 1898–1967)
Watercolor, crayon over graphite, ink and gouache
Sheet: 42.2 x 32.2 cm (16 5/8 x 12 11/16 in.)
Bequest of Lockwood Thompson 1992.274
© C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
not on view
This drawing belongs to a series in which René Magritte depicted an easel before a window. Each features a canvas that exactly replicates the landscape beyond it, inviting questions about the boundaries between art and reality. Magritte juxtaposed a highly realistic style and unexpected imagery to evoke the subconscious and question the experience of time and space. Of his Human Condition series, he wrote that he wanted to place the viewer “inside the room in the picture and, at the same time, conceptually outside in the real landscape.”