“Thought”, 1925

In 1907 Dali’s sister Ana Maria was born. Seen here in his 1924 portrait, she would be almost the only female model in his paintings until he met his wife Gala in 1929. In 1949 she published a memoir, “Dali as Seen by His Sister”.

Dali was, by his own ready admission, thoroughly spoiled by his family. Apart from being barred from fraternising with the household staff in the kitchen, he wrote in “The Secret Life”, “I was allowed to do anything I pleased. I wet my bed till I was eight for the sheer fun of it. I was the absolute monarch of the house. Nothing was good enough for me. My father and mother worshiped me.

“On the day of the Feast of Kings I received among innumerable gifts a dazzling king’s costume — a gold crown studded with great topazes and an ermine cape; from that time on I lived almost continually disguised in this costume.”

Perhaps inevitably, his sister would suffer as a result of Salvador’s elevated status in the household. When he was six, in 1910, he recalled, the appearance of Halley’s comet created quite a stir. When everyone rushed up to the terrace of the house one day upon hearing that it was visible, Dali remained paralysed because someone had suggested its tail might touch the earth and destroy it.

When he finally set out to join them he noticed Ana crawling through a doorway.

“I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.

“But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down into his office, where I remained for punishment till dinnertime.

“The fact of not having been allowed to see the comet has remained seared in my memory as one of the most intolerable frustrations of my life. I screamed with such rage that I completely lost my voice.

“Noticing how this frightened my parents, I learned to make use of the stratagem on the slightest provocation.

“On another occasion when I happened to choke on a fishbone my father, who couldn’t stand such things, got up and left the dining room holding his head between his hands. Thereafter on several occasions I simulated the hacking and hysterical convulsions that accompany such choking just to observe my father’s reaction and to attract an anguished and exclusive attention to my person.”

Salvador’s brutal kicking of his sister didn’t prevent him from lunging to her defence when the family doctor came to the house to pierce her earlobes. Reacting to what he perceived as “outrageous cruelty”, he waited for the doctor to settle into position to perform the operation.

“Then I broke into the room brandishing my leather-thonged mattress beater and whipped the doctor right across the face, breaking his glasses. He was quite an old man and he cried out with pain. When my father came running in he fell on his shoulder …

“Since then I loved to be sick, if only for the pleasure of seeing the little face of that old man whom I had reduced to tears.”

In “The Secret Life”, Dali happily chronicled his horrendous childhood behaviour. It should be stressed, however, that biographer Ian Gibson found little that was bizarre in Dali’s youth, the suggestion being that Salvador deliberately invented myths to enliven this era and cast himself in a cruel and macabre light.

Dali remembered catching a bat and biting it nearly in two, and at school — the Immaculate Conception primary school, run by the Brothers of the Marist Order — deliberately throwing himself down stone staircases just so he could relish the attention he received.

“The Broken Bridge and the Dream”, 1945

Earlier in his autobiography, Dali described another cruel episode. He was five at the time, and walking alongside a smaller boy on a tricycle, pushing him along. They were on the edge of the village of “Cambrils near Barcelona”, he wrote, and came to a bridge under construction.

Salvador was suddenly seized with the impulse to injure the boy. He made sure no one was watching and pushed the child over the edge, sending him five metres to the rocks below.

The boy was laid up for a week “with a badly injured head”, but in the initial commotion back at the house, Dali sat in a parlour chair quietly eating cherries. “I don’t recall having experienced the slightest feeling of guilt over this incident,” he wrote.

“There is no doubt that Dali really committed this atrocious deed,” Carlos Rojas and Alma Amell insist in their 1993 biography “Salvador Dali, Or The Art of Spitting on Your Mother’s Portrait”.

They note with surprise, though, that “as if his superego censored at least a symbolic part of these memories, he gives the wrong name for the place”.

Since he places the location near Barcelona, they say, it couldn’t have been Cambrils, which is in Tarragona, but Cabrils, some 120 kilometres away. Below is a almost surrealistic Google Earth image of houses on a hill in Cabrils.

Rosa Salleras, another Figueras native, was a childhood friend of Dali’s, six years younger but a frequent playmate, “a kind of younger sister”, as Ewen Carmichael described her in a 2004 article for the Scotsman, a recollection of meeting her before her death two years earlier.

Their parents’ summer homes were next to each other in Cadaqués, and when Rosa was nine and Dali 16 he painted her “standing high above the Bay of Cadaqués”.

“On first glance it appears raw and amateurish,” Carmichael wrote, “but on closer inspection the true genius of Dali shines through. It is an extraordinary painting for one so young and captured the mood of the child-woman.”

Rosa said Dali, always short of money and materials, painted a landscape on the reverse side.

It’s not clear what painting they’re discussing, but the 1918 canvas above — “View of Port d’Alguer, Cadaqués” in the collection of the Dali Museum in Florida — was originally owned by “Rosa Salleras de Naveira”, and then by Barcelona’s Galeria Maragall, where Eleanor and Reynolds Morse purchased it.

Below, two canvases that might “stand in”, but painted much later and hardly “amateurish”.

“Girl of Cadaques”, from 1926

“Portrait of a Girl in a Landscape (Cadaques)”, circa 1926

Rosa remembered Dali — who she characterised as timid, shy and always blushing in front of girls — teaching her to catch bats by tying white cloths to the top of poles and waving them around until the bats fell exhausted to the ground.

Dali’s father, she said, “was a sort of dictatorial man” who reminded her of Mussolini.

And Rosa remembered, as well, Ana Maria’s dismay when Gala arrived on the scene.

Dali’s sister “was furious”, she said. “And she was hurt. I think she was very jealous because she was always in the front row. Whenever Salvador was invited, Ana Maria was invited. She was the first lady. Then when Salvador met and married Gala, Ana Maria didn’t have any place.”

The Pichot family of Barcelona — the name is often seen as Pixtot, the Catalan version, and Dali spelled it Pitchot in his 1942 autobiography — also had a farm-estate just outside Figueras called El Moli de la Torre, the Tower Mill.

Various sources say it’s just on the way into town along the highway that runs from Roses on the Cap de Creus peninsula across the Empordà plain. In the Google Earth image above you can see the husks of some buildings. The N-260 motorway from Roses slices up into Figueras, parallel with the smaller Carrer del Port de la Selva. The blacktop thoroughfare looping off the N-260, past the ruins, is Cami del Moli. The area is all industrial, with a water-purification plant nearby and, alongside the Cami del Moli, a canal that, at a stretch, might once have powered a mill.

It’s not much evidence on which to hang a claim that this is where Dali “learned to paint”, at the Pichot family business, a fulling mill, but his story is prone to apparitions in the heat of the Catalonian sun.

Fulling mills, sometimes called tucking or walking mills, are where cloth, usually woollen, is cleaned of oil, dirt and other impurities, a process that makes it thicker. The adolescent Dali was more interested in other things he found on the estate, the female family members and labourers included.

There were, most importantly though, Ramon Pichot’s paintings, hung throughout the house, a source of fascination for Salvador, who in turn began committing the surrounding landscape to canvas as early as 1914.

Salvador was a chronically ill child, and not all of his ailments were imaginary, so “my parents decided to send me to the country for a rest; I was to visit the Pitchot family.

“My parents before me had already undergone the influence of the personality of the Pitchot family. All of them were artists and possessed great gifts and an unerring taste. Ramon Pitchot was a painter, Ricardo a cellist, Luis a violinist, Maria a contralto who sang in the opera.

“Pepito was, perhaps, the most artistic of all without, however, having cultivated any of the fine arts in particular. But it was he who created the house at Cadaques, and who had a unique sense of the garden and of life in general.

“Mercedes, too, was a Pitchot 100 per cent, and she was possessed of a mystical and fanatical sense of the house. She married that great Spanish poet Eduardo Marquina, who brought to the picturesque realism of this Catalonian family the Castillian note of austerity and of delicacy which was necessary for the climate of civilisation of the Pitchot family to achieve its exact point of maturity.”

Pepito Pichot persuaded Dali’s father to let the boy take lessons from the German portrait and landscape artist Siegfrid Burmann, who was staying in Cadaques at the time.

The mill’s tower resonated like a dream image in “The Dream Approaches” from 1933, above, and below, “The Horseman of Death” and “The Tower”, both from a year later.

In “The Dream Approaches”, a sheet covers what could be a coffin, atop which sits an object resembling female genitalia. The tower is a decrepit symbol of death as well as desire. In his autobiography Dali recalled the tower mill as the setting for his first sexual — and violent — urges toward a girl. There’s little doubt that the tower recurs in his art as a phallic symbol.

‘’Naked, and comparing myself to my schoolfriends, I discovered that my penis was small, pitiful and soft,” Dali told Andre Parinaud in 1976 for what became “The Unspeakable Confessions Of Salvador Dali”.

“I can recall a pornographic novel whose Don Juan machine-gunned female genitals with ferocious glee, saying that he enjoyed hearing women creak like watermelons. I convinced myself that I would never be able to make a woman creak like a watermelon.”

Having a small penis is a common self-criticism among men, of course, but biographer Ian Gibson, having scoured Salvador’s adolescent writings with a magnifying glass, said he’d found ample evidence in the frank outpourings that the young Dali’s relationship with his first girlfriend had suffered because of his shortcoming and he ended up masturbating frequently.

Presumably the “revelation” is important to art historians trying to track the meaning of Dali’s paintings, in which masturbation, like the tower, was a regular theme.

Louis Markoya of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, Dali’s protege in the 1970s, has serious doubts about Gibson’s credibility, but points out that Salvador had his own spin on the subject in his book “Dali on Modern Art: The Cuckolds of Antiquated Modern Art”. Intriguingly, he said he could tell the size of any given artist’s penis by his work.

The artists he disliked most tended to have large penises that he said weighed them down and made them stupid and incapable of painting or drawing anything beautiful. The reverse was true for geniuses, including himself, Raphael, Vermeer, Leonardo and Velazquez. (He rated himself against these same individuals as an artist, too. See this post.)

“Not only did the smaller glans allow you to be a genius (’allowing a lightness only angels can appreciate and acquire’), but it brought you further along on the evolutionary scale, closer to the angels themselves,” Louis says by way of explaining Dali’s reasoning.

“As with many things Dali, he cited some proofs which included the sizes of Raphael’s cherubs’ penises, and the size of Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, whom he insisted was modelled after Leonardo himself.

“One place Dali said he was stumped,” Louis continues, “was with Picasso, who, Dali said, had a large penis, and was also a genius, something that Dali said was no easy feat, and it even garnered extra admiration for his Spanish compatriot — but at the same time he cuckolded him, since Dali was naturally more evolved, angelic and capable of ascension.”

Sold at auction in 2007 for $2,368,000, “Nostalgic Echo” from 1935 features another sort of tower, this one the belltower at Ana Maria Dali’s school in Figueras, according to Robert Descharnes. A girl skipping rope can be seen inside, an echo of the figure on the ground before it.

Even Descharnes, Dali’s close friend and the most widely accepted authority on his work, couldn’t place the other elements, but in 1941 Museum of Modern Art curator James Thrall Soby suggested a keyhole forming the letter “i” in the pentagonal portal, an image repeated by the bell tower.

“Morphological Echo” came after this work, and Giorgio de Chirico’s “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street” preceded it, and from the latter there is indeed an echo of imminent danger in the isolation.

“De Chirico’s calm and tranquility,” Dali said, “was dramatic because constantly threatened. All that geometric anaesthesia was moving because it abandoned futurism and vaguely foreshadowed surrealism”.

Detail from “A Hairdresser Preoccupied by the Persistence of Good Weather”, 1932

Just as crucially in the Dali hierarchy of emblems, the Tower Mill was the first place he ever saw a crutch, and he explained in “The Secret Life” how it came to be such a ubiquitous feature of his art.

He and his cousin Julia were helping fetch ladders for the linden-blossom pickers from the tower attic, “immense and dark, cluttered with miscellaneous objects” and heretofore out of bounds to him.

“I immediately discovered two objects which stood out with a surprising personality.” One was a crown of gilded laurel stems that had been made for an opera star performing in Barcelona, and the second was a crutch, of which Dali immediately took possession.

“I felt that I should never again in my life be able to separate myself from it, such was the fetishistic fanaticism which seized me at the very first without my being able to explain it. The superb crutch!

“Already it appeared to me as the object possessing the height of authority and solemnity. It immediately replaced the old mattress beater with leather fringes which I had adopted a long time ago as a sceptre and which I had lost one day …

“I victoriously descended into the garden, hobbling solemnly with my crutch in one hand. This object communicated to me an assurance, an arrogance even, which I had never been capable of until then.”

SUPPORT GROUP: Clockwise from top left, “The Persistence of Fine Weather” detail, “Meditation on the Harp”, “The Spectre of Sex Appeal” detail and “Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Making a Cranial Harp”

The totemic power of his crutch was bolstered when he used it to poke at and then flip over his pet hedgehog when he found it dead and maggot-ridden. Clearly it was a tool useful even against death, and it came in supremely handy again a decade later, when Dali was struggling to gain entry into Paris high society.

He reasoned that the artistocratic and wealthy were “people who, instead of standing on the world with both feet, balance themselves on a single foot, like storks”, keeping in touch with “the common base of the world only by what is strictly necessary”.

This they did by tolerating the occasional “pederastic and drug-addicted artists”. Dali would gain their support, he decided, by being their crutch instead of these pitiful creatures.

“I had the original idea of not coming with empty hands, like all the rest. I arrived, in fact, with my arms loaded with crutches! One thing I realised immediately: It would take quantities and quantities of crutches to give a semblance of solidity …

“And I inaugurated the ‘pathetic crutch’ … to support the monstrous development of certain atmospheric-cephalic skulls … crutches to make architectural and durable the fugitive pose of a choreographic leap, to pin the ephemeral butterfly of the dancer with pins that would keep her poised for eternity. Crutches, crutches, crutches, crutches.

“I even invented a tiny facial crutch of gold and rubies [based on the one found in “Self-portrait with Fried Bacon” — see this post]. Its bifurcated part was flexible and was intended to hold up and fit the tip of the nose. The other end was softly rounded and was designed to lean on the central hollow above the upper lip. It was therefore a nose crutch, an absolutely useless kind of object to appeal to the snobbism of certain criminally elegant women, just as some beings wear monocles without having any other need of them than to feel the sacred tug of their exhibitionism incrusted in the flesh of their own face.”

“My symbol of the crutch so adequately fitted and continues to fit into the unconscious myths of our epoch that, far from tiring us, this fetish has come to please everyone more and more …

“When I had made my first attempt at keeping the aristocracy standing upright by propping it with a thousand crutches, I looked it in the face and said to it honestly, ‘Now I am going to give you a terrible kick in the leg.’

“The aristocracy drew up a little more the leg that it kept lifted, like a stork. ‘Go ahead,’ it answered, and gritted its teeth to endure the pain stoically, without a cry.
Then, using all my might, I gave it a terrific kick right in the shin.

“It did not budge. I had therefore propped it well. ‘Thank you,’ it said to me. ‘Never fear,’ I answered as I left, kissing its hand, ‘I’ll be back. With the pride of your one leg and the crutches of my intelligence, you are stronger than the revolution that is being prepared by the intellectuals, whom I know intimately.

“‘You are old, and dead with fatigue, and you have fallen from your high place, but the spot where your foot is soldered to the earth is tradition. If you should happen to die, I would come at once and place my own foot in that very imprint of tradition which has been yours, and immediately I would curl up my other leg like a stork. I am ready and able to grow old in this attitude, without tiring.’”

“The Average, Fine and Invisible Harp”, 1934

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The original theatre structure in which the museum now stands was designed by architect Roca i Bros. It burned down in 1939 and remained a gutted husk until Dali was convinced to place his museum there.

The museum officially opened on September 28, 1974, and the adjoining Torre Gorgot became part of it later, rechristened Torre Galatea. This is where he lived in his old age, following Gala’s death, and where the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation now has its offices.

In the courtyard garden that now spans the area where the theatre stalls once perched is the installation entitled “Car-naval”, which includes one of the Dalis’ Cadillacs, on which Ernst Fuchs’ statue of Queen Esther rides; a marble bust by François Girardon; a reproduction of Michelangelo’s “The Slave”; and, as seen in the photo above, a boat that once belonged to Gala and a column of car tires.

Nearby is the Rainy Taxi, and ringing the courtyard are paintings by Evarist Vallès.

Also on the ground floor are the Sala de Peixateries — the Fish Shop — which is where you can see “Soft Self-portrait with Grilled Bacon” and “Portrait of Picasso”. Another room with Dali’s drawings on view connects to the maestro’s crypt.

Few visitors realise they are walking directly about the tomb as they cross the white marble slab in the middle of the red-brick floor of the main hall. The crypt is behind a wall decorated with a cross and the words “Salvador Dali Domeneci, Pubol Markisi, 1904-1989″.

The theatre’s old stage, now crowned by a geodesic dome designed by Emilio Pérez Piñero, is occupied by Dali’s towering backdrop for the ballet “Labyrinth”, and to one side is “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Metres Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln”.

To the left is the Sala del Tresor — the Treasure Room — which has “Basket of Bread”, “Galarina”, “Atomic Leda” and “The Spectre of Sex Appeal” on view. To the right is the popular Mae West Room.

On the next floor up is the Sala Palau del Vent — the Wind Palace Room. Here, where Dali exhibited his art in public for the first time at age 14, is the Sistine-like ceiling fresco he toiled on during the mid-1970s. He painted himself and Gala as if ascending into Heaven, and from their torsos, cabinet drawers open to pour out gold coins.

A post by “Eric” on the website Classical Values claims this artwork, featured in an “official Dali calendar” one year, is somehow related to the museum’s geodesic cupola, showing 16 figures arrayed as if part of a zodiac.

In the adjacent room is “Poetry of America”, and to the left the Sala de les Joies — the Jewel Room — with 39 pieces Dali designed between 1932 and 1970, along with the preparatory drawings.

On the third floor Dali’s private art collection is shown, including works by Meissonier, Fortuny, Modest Urgell, Gerard Dou, El Greco, Marcel Duchamp and Bouguereau along with some of his own, such as “Automatic Beginning of a Portrait of Gala”.

On the second floor is the gallery of paintings by Antoni Pichot, of the local family that meant so much to Dali.

Appointed by Dali the theatre-museum’s director, Antoni Pichot was at his side daily the last nine years of his life, watching him putter as best he could, listening always to the music of “Tristan and Isolde”.

When Dali asked him to run his museum Pichot balked. “I’m a painter, not a manager.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Dali replied, “a manager who doesn’t do anything! You’re perfect.”

Pichot remembered first meeting Dali in 1950. His father took him along at the end of each summer to see what the maestro had come up with, and that summer, he said it was “The Last Supper”. Pichot can be forgiven for slipping on the year: “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” was done in 1955.

The Pichot’s home in Figueras was levelled by a bomb during the civil war, and they moved to San Sebastian. There, Antoni’s drawing instructor was none other than Juan Nuñez Fernández, who had taught Dali in Figueras 30 years before.

In 1972 Dali had a chance to see Pichot’s studio and enigmatically pronounced his one of his works “the painting of Opus Dei”. He carted it off, and the next day phoned to ask Antoni to help him with the museum, where his art would appear on permanent display.

Pichot paints the rocks of Cape Creus, seeing in each stone people and stories that almost suggest a paranoiac-critical approach.

Dali had once coached him: “Spread an armload of your beach stones on a table and you get ‘The Battle of Constantine’ by Raphael. Let’s see if you’re able to paint that.” Antoni obliged, and Dali wrote the the introduction for Pichot’s 1958 Barcelona exhibition where his own “The Battle of Constantine” was featured.

When the rocks awaken from their long sleep, he said, the noise is that of a ferocious battle.

The four “monsters” in the theatre-museum are pieces Pichot created with Dali in 1975, made with rocks, boards, tree limbs, parts of a whale skeleton and conch shells.

Above and right, Dali makes a grand show for the press photographers on an October 1968 visit to the Spanish Congress in Madrid.

He was in the capital to make a pitch to state minister Sanchez-Arjona on behalf of the museum in Figueras.

The theatre-museum may well have remained a dream had it not been for Figueras’ mayor in the early 1960s, Ramon Guardiola. Dali unveiled plans for the museum at a reception the town held in his honour on August 12, 1961. Guardiola knew from the start what he was up against if he was to help Dali make this dream a reality: Two prominent government officials found excuses not to attend the reception.

The party was a success just the same, even if a fierce north wind prevented a helicopter from hauling off the dead bull from the “surrealist corrida” Dali had arranged. The town council presented him with a medal it had minted for the occasion, the Silver Leaf, and unveiled a plaque on the house where he was born. And, amid the ruins of the old municipal theatre, the artist revealed his grand scheme for a museum of his own.

The fund-raising was now to begin, but Guardiola soon learned that there was scant enthusiasm about donating money to support the project. In terms of officialdom, only the head of the Girona regional government and a few prominent citizens were interested.

Just the same, Guardiola hired architect Ros de Ramis and secured a small grant from the Information and Tourism Ministry. Dali didn’t help matters by announcing that, based on his belief that originals and reproductions would have the same value in the future, he would fill the museum with copies of his paintings.

He then asked that one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes be erected over the museum courtyard. And when work on the museum failed to begin, he threatened to move the project to Paris or Perpignan instead.

Gala put in her two pesetas, telling Guardiola that if construction hadn’t begun by the time she and Salvador returned the following spring, she would “send six anarchists from Paris to blow up what remains of the theatre”.

A close-up of the drenched mannequin inside the “Rainy Taxi” at the museum.

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For his anguish, belatedly, the town of Figueras posthumously awarded the Silver Leaf to Guardiola in 1975, in recognition of his role in the museum’s construction.

Guardiola had moved to Figueras in 1950, and five years later met Dali at the local high school, which at the time was the provisional home of the Museum of the Empordà. Dali promised some of his artwork, though nothing ever came of it.

Guardiola tried again, this time asking Dali to provide something for the title page of the museum magazine’s December 1955 issue. This he did, and at the same time he developed an admiration for Guardiola’s knowledge about plant cultivation.

When, on his annual return to Port Lligat in the spring of 1956, Dali found that a winter chill had killed off most of the olive trees in the area, he was heartsick. Olives meant a great deal to him. He often called Gala “Oliveta”, and García Lorca had referred to Dali’s “olive-coloured voice”. The olive groves of Cadaques were to Dali like “some grey and venerable hairs that crown the philosophical head of the hills”.

So he sought Guardiola’s advice, and an expert was found who offered a formula with which to treat the ailing trees. Dali prepared the potion himself, and within a few weeks there were again signs of life. He packed some specimens in a box and took them to the agricultural institute in Girona for analysis.

When the box was opened, a cloud of insects fell out. The cause was found, and the remedy, and most of the olive trees were saved.

Below, a photo of Dali evaluating the sketches of art students who would visit the museum and consult him on a weekly basis at times during the 1970s.

Every January 20, the feast day of Saint Sebastian, the more pious citizens of Cadaques climb a steep path in a 90-minute procession up Mount Pení to the Sant Sebastià Hermitage, an old house perched in the midst of cork oak. The photo below was posted by lluiscanyet on Panoramio.

I’ve read that it’s owned by Sebastian Guinness, a scion of the Irish brewing family who owns a gallery in Dublin named for him. For its opening in 2008 Guinness produced the “lost” Warhol portrait of Farah Diba Pahlavi, the exiled empress of Iran, claiming he’d bought from the Warhol estate.

At any rate, the structure partway up 600-metre Mount Pení is privately owned and opened to the public only on January 20. From the property you can pick out fragments of the landscape that Dali painted in his youth. Just to the south is the Pichot family’s summer house.

In earlier centuries the hermitage doubled as a talaia — a look-out from which the villagers could watch for approaching pirates, whose harbour raids were a frequent menace.

Dali was 16 or 17 when he painted “Fiesta at the Hermitage”, above, and with a detail below, on one side of a piece of cardboard and “The Fair of the Holy Cross at Figueras”, show a little further down, on the other.

The first depicts a celebration of feast day of Saint Sebastian. Dali included himself chatting up a pair of young women who are arm in arm.

Dali biographer Dawn Ades glimpsed his political interests in “Fiesta at the Hermitage”, a “subtle sense of social division” in the isolation of the gypsy in a headscarf in the centre.

The second side, the verso, has the annual fete of the title on the feast day of the Holy Cross in May, for which Dali was hired to paint posters. It’s chaotic, and Dali probably deliberately tried to tone this down in his later, simpler, less populous pictures of town fetes.

Here he was trying to capture what he termed the “living bazaar, a great music box” that during the festivities engulfed Plaça de la Palmera, where his family lived (Dali was by then in Madrid). Footballers and bullfighters mingle with gypsies and circus performers, bashful girls and shameless boys.

Football was just catching on in Figueras, and two of Dali’s schoolmates, Jaume Miravidles and Joan Maria Torres, played for Unió Esportiva. He did portraits of both, and shown here is that of Miravidles.

Both sides of the double painting of the festivals are finished works, together now on view at the Dali-Theatre Museum, but the “Hermitage” side was originally shown along with seven other paintings Dali contributed to the Catalan Students Association exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona in late January 1922.

The dual painting was shown publicly again a few months later, at the Exhibition of Empordà Artists in Figueras, though it’s not known which side.

Critics found them derivative, but even if Dali winced at perceived allusions to Nogués and other artists, he took them overall as a compliment.

Dali’s sister Ana Maria described the church festivals in her 1951 book “All Year Round in Cadaqués”.

On the feast of Saint Sebastian, to this day, the parish priest carries a baroque statue of the saint in procession up a hill, through the olive groves, to the church, leading a band of musicians and the faithful.

“Romeria — Pilgrimage”, from 1921

“The young girls, with red, blue, magenta and yellow dresses, seem like flowers amidst the earthy greyness of the old ladies’ dresses,” Ana Maria Dali wrote. “Just like an allegory to the earth and the flowers born of it.

“Everybody carries bags, baskets full of meat, wine bottles, baskets of sea urchins. The odd dog, of the sort that they call around here ‘basket dogs’, because they have the job of guarding the food bag while the master works, follows along friskily and absent-mindedly. The very young couples hang back a little behind the others, holding hands.”

At the top of the hill by the chapel a luncheon of seafood and ribs is prepared as music for sardana dancing is played, while inside the church “the Saint Sebastian songs are sung”.

Soon after his decommissioning from the army in 1927, while summering in Cadaques with Garcia Lorca, Dali wrote a poem titled “Saint Sebastián” that was published in L’Amic de les Aris and the newspaper El Gallo.

The cleverly poetic prose sent a ripple through Catalan literati. Dali concocted a metaphor between the arrow-riddled saint finding armour in his faith and the artist patiently letting his painting “ripen”, and elaborated on his ideas about painting being more precise than photography.

The painting shown here is “Saint Sebastian” from 1982.