René Magritte (1898-1967)

Executed in 1960, Le séducteur is filled with the mystery and wonder of René Magritte's pictorial universe. Against the crimson sky of the evening is the silhouette of a tall ship in full sail. Yet this silhouette is formed from the water itself, the ship appearing to be made from the very element upon which it was intended to float. This gouache is a reprisal of a theme that Magritte had first explored in a painting of the same title, dating from 1950 and now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

The theme of Le séducteur, the seducer, was one to which Magritte would refer when discussing the genesis of his pictures, serving almost as his casebook. Only a couple of years after he completed this gouache, he would explain: 'I believe it is wrong to confuse 'reality', that is, the world in its entirety , with the possible image of certain realities, because in that case a painted image would be deemed 'less real' than a cannon or a loaf of bread, for instance... As for my painting, it does not show anything imaginary... It shows total reality, i.e. reality with its mystery, not separated from its mystery, (To see a boat on the water is a vision of reality separated from mystery. To see water in the shape of a boat, is to evoke mystery and to see the water and the boat). To see the image of water which has the shape of a boat is not too bad a manifestation of the world, I think?' (Magritte, quoted in D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Vol.III, London, 1993, p. 174).