“Gala and The Angelus of Millet Before the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses” from 1933 is at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Dali returned again and again to Jean-Francois Millet’s 1857-59 painting “The Angelus”, which is a reassuring image for some, haunting to others, including Dali.

Thomas Appleton, the wealthy American who asked Millet to paint a scene of a farm couple in prayer, reneged on the purchase, at which point the Frenchman added the steeple and changed the title. This is “The Angelus”, originally called “Prayer for the Potato Crop”, now a depiction of the recitation of the Angelus, the Christian devotion celebrating Jesus’ incarnation:

Widely reproduced, the picture became hugely popular in Europe, and US and French bidders ultimately fought over the canvas, pushing its value to 800,000 gold francs, a sum made all the more ironic given the destitution of Millet’s surviving family.

Dali explaind in his 1942 autobiography “The Secret Life” how the image of Millet’s “Angelus” was early on interwined in his mind with cypresses.

From his desk in his classroom at the Christian Brothers’ school of Figueras, he could see two large cypresses of almost equal height outside.

“The window which served as a frame to my vision was opened only in the afternoon, but from then on I would absorb myself entirely in the contemplation of the changes of light on the two cypresses, along which the slightly sinuous shadow of the rectilinear architecture of our school would slowly rise …

“Just before sunset the pointed tip of the cypress on the right would appear strongly illuminated with a dark red, as though it had been dipped in wine, while the one on the left, already completely in the shadow, appeared to me to be a deep black.

“Then we heard the chiming of the Angelus, and the whole class would stand up and we would repeat in chorus the prayer recited with bowed head …”

With the sky by now darkened, Salvador’s attention shifted to the lighted hallway beyond the glass-panelled door, where oil paintings covered the walls.

“From my seat I could see only two of them distinctly: one represented a fox’s head emerging from a cavern, carrying a dead goose dangling from its jaws; the other was a copy of Millet’s ‘Angelus’.”

The latter painting produced in Dali “an obscure anguish”, yet the couple gave him “a sense of being somewhat under their protection, and a secret and refined pleasure shone in the depth of my fear like a little silvery knife blade gleaming in the sunlight”.

The couple became two of the five “sentinels” guarding the young Dali, along with the two cypresses and the crucified Christ standing on the teacher’s desk.

For Dali, Millet’s painting eventually took on an underlying theme of repressed sexual aggression. In the context of the brother who predeceased him in childhood, it’s understandable that he saw the couple not praying for a good crop but for the soul of their son, just buried.

Much later he had the canvas X-rayed, and beneath the pigment there was indeed something overpainted, shaped like a coffin. Not everyone was convinced — it could have been more of Dali’s paranoiac-critical perception, if not outright imagination — but in 1963 he wrote an analysis of the work called “The Tragic Myth of The Angelus of Millet”.

The best known of Dali’s reworkings of “The Angelus” is 1934’s “Meditation on the Harp”, shown here:

Fascinated yet repelled by sex, Dali reinterpreted Millet with a pitchfork supporting a phallus, and the man’s hat held as if to cover an erection. The black figure in front of the couple, which some believe is meant to be Dali himself, has a swollen foot — an etymological allusion to the name Oedipus.

Others see a picture of castration, the woman as praying mantis about to devour a man emasculated, as Dali had no doubt felt early on in his relationship with the volatile Gala.

There is no harp evident, other than in the title. In mediaeval times, it’s been noted, the harp was one of several musical instruments considered tools of Satan, as Hieronymus Bosch suggested by crucifying a man on a harp in “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.

Below, the instrument’s absence is acknowledged in “The Invisible Harp”, also from 1934.

In “Gala and the Angelus of Millet”, at the top of this post, his wife is elaborately clothed, complete with the transparent visor in faddish style at the time, in the company of Vladmir Lenin and, peeking from behind the door, Maxim Gorky, capped with a lobster. Millet’s “Angelus” hangs prominently above the doorway.

At the same time Dali was painting “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus”, shown above with Millet trying to find out what’s going on, and “The Architectural Angelus of Millet”, below, the latter sometimes called “The Architectonic Angelus of Millet”. Both are dated 1933.

Here, “Architectural / Architectonic” revisits Millet in a pair of rock formations on a beach. The child Dali holds his father’s hands and watches a titanic confrontation. The “male” formation on the left is bigger, he noted, but the the female formation is the one reaching out, perhaps aggressively, to make contact.

“Atavism at Twilight”, 1934

Below, two of Dali’s illustrations for “Les Chants de Maldoror” (a project examined in this post).

Cypresses recurring throughout 1934 …

“Morning Ossification of the Cypress”

“Eclipse and Vegetable Osmosis”

“Apparition of My Cousin Carolinetta on the Beach at Rosas”

A detail from “Sugar Sphinx”

“Angelus of Gala”, 1935

In the copy of Millet’s painting in the background here, Dali has given full rein to his notion of the female figure as praying mantis, ready to pounce on her mate. It’s been suggested that Gala is mimicking that menace in her facial expression, directed at the “male” seated in front of her.