“I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B DeMille and Walt Disney,” Dali wrote to Andre Breton in Paris. Dali finally met the last of this triumvirate at a party in 1945 or ‘46 at the home of Warner Brothers studio chief Jack Warner.

The cover of a northern California events-listing periodical from 1947.

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Warner had commissioned the Spaniard to paint portraits of him and his wife, and Dali in turn pitched an idea to the movie mogul — a “documentary” about Dali’s book “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”.

The latter notion got nowhere — just like Dali’s proposal to Federico Fellini for a screen adaptation of his autobiography “The Secret Life” — but the Warners’ portraits turned out great.

Above “Portrait of Colonel Jack Warner”, and below, a detail of “Portrait of Mrs Jack Warner”.

In May 2008, the study for the painting of Mrs Warner, seen below, came up for bidding at Bonham’s in New York, at an estimated price of between $40,000 and $60,000. There were no takers.

In her 1965 biography “The Case of Salvador Dali”, Fleur Cowles recounted Jack Warner’s tale of accepting the Dali treatment. When Salvador and Gala showed up at the Warners’ mansion to begin the portrait, Jack had assumed it would be a swift sitting.

“I was wrong, it took him five years! Of course he was not a house guest all that time. He would do several brilliant pen-and-ink sketches of my eyebrows, my mustache and my little finger, then off he would go to his beloved Spain. This went on for all those years.”

Whenever Warner asked for a progress report, Dali would only say that Dragon “looked fine”, referring to Warner’s co-subject in the potrait, his pet Schnauzer.

On seeing the finished picture, Warner suggested some minor alterations. Dali told him editing was only done in the movies, but made the changes anyway. Nevertheless, Warner hung the portrait in Dragon’s kennel.

Fleur Cowles, who died in 2009 and is seen in the photo with Dali below, also recalled the time Dali played a trick on Warner during one of their after-dinner strolls in the garden, during which the film mogul enjoyed crushing any snails he saw. Finding the lawn teeming with more snails than usual, Dali goaded him into spearing and smashing them all one by one with his walking stick.

Dali was beside himself with laughter — he’d planted fake snails all over the garden.

Dali approached Disney with the suggestion that Walt was the man who could make “the first motion picture of the Never Seen Before”.

Disney saw the possiblities and assigned director John Hench to help Dali turn the Mexican ballad “Destino” into a six-minute animated film at the Disney studios.

The company hit a financial reef, however, and “Destino” the film was shelved, to be finally resurrected in 2002, freshened up with some computer-generated imagery.

At least financing was the official excuse. To this day some will argue that Disney feared the American middle-class would find Dali’s imagination too disturbing.

Meanwhile, as happened on the “Spellbound” set, collectors absconded with much of Dali’s artwork for the cartoon, including storyboards. Some have occasionally shown up at auction.

When the Tate Modern held an exhibition on Dali and film in 2006 it published an interview with Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew and ultimately director emeritus of the Walt Disney Company, who recalled that his uncle had John Hench share his classical-art background with Dali on the “Destino” project.

“Dali produced about 15 paintings and about 135 sketches. They worked closely together to the point where they couldn’t tell each other’s drawings apart … John was the only one in the world, until he died, who could sit down with us and say: ‘That’s mine, that’s his.’

“After eight months the project stopped because of money problems,” Roy Disney said, “but Hench took two painted cells of Dali’s work and simulated an animated movie on a camera stand.”

This was the 18-second clip rediscovered at the Disney studio decades later.

“The modern techniques which we subsequently [added] — such as revolving cameras around objects — made sense, and are actually very Dali-esque in themselves. I know that he and Walt would have gone nuts to be able to do that kind of filming.”

In late 2001, Spain’s El Mundo reported that a Barcelona merchant had come forward with 11 of Dali’s 1946 preparatory drawings for “Destino”. It was thought all of his contributions had been dispersed among private collectors or stored in a Disney warehouse after the project was abandoned.

Disney biographer Christopher Johns told the newspaper that determining whether such pieces were Dali’s or John Hench’s was as problematic as tracing their origin. Nevertheless, the director of Barcelona’s Chagall Gallery, where the 11 drawings were put on exhibit, swore they were genuine Dalis.

Dali and Disney never worked together again, although there were other proposals shared. One involved an animated feature on Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, another on “Don Quixote”.

British commentator Brian Sewell has claimed that Walt Disney contacted Dali “as late as 1961″ (the Gala-Dali Foundation has said 1957) about the possibility of making these animations. Dali, some believe, did make the cels in 1962 and 1963.

Captain Peter Moore, Dali’s long-time secretary who died under a cloud of suspicion over alleged forgeries, included 101 “Divine Comedy” prints in an exhibition at his Figueras gallery, the Perrot-Moore Art Centre, in 1998, but they were different from the original illustrations.

Speculation ensued that these prints were in fact animation cels that Moore had commissioned another artist to prepare for a proposed film version of “The Divine Comedy”. These works were among those seized by the police when Moore was soon after charged with manipulating Dali originals.

The 103 watercolours Dali made at the request of the Italian government to commemorate a Dante Alighieri anniversary generated a huge controversy of their own. The epic journey to heaven and hell proved decidedly hellish whenever Dali got involved. See the post “The Great Dali Art Fraud”.

Below are three views of a study for “The Source”, one of the illustrations for the “Purgatory” segment of Dante’s epic poem. In early 2009 Sotheby’s was expecting to command up to £25,000 for the work at auction.