Portrait of Grandmother Ana Sewing by Salvador Dali

Portrait of Grandmother Ana Sewing by Salvador Dali, 1921

As a youth Dali frequently did portraits. This one shows his maternal grandmother, Mariana Ferrer Sadurni, sewing in front of the window in Cadaqués.

In commenting on this picture, Dali remarked: "Shortly after my departure for Madrid she had become almost blind and only partially conscious, not even recognizing the people who came to say hello to her. She would say, 'Is it Mathilda? Is it my father?' At this time I was at the School of Fine Arts and she did not see me any more. However, before dying and in front of all those assembled around her, she said, 'I have a cousin, in fact ... I don't know what my relationship is with him, but he is studying in Madrid and he is going to become the most famous of all Catalonian painters.' And shortly thereafter she died! This painting is prophetic, because when I did it my grandmother's sight was already very poor and she was wearing glasses, and I myself, whose eyesight is of the keenest, later for fear of self-punishment often pictured blind people in my paintings." Examples are Sentimental Colloquy, Resurrection of the Flesh, and The Apotheosis of Homer. 

This portrait was done c. 1921, at the same time that he was working on a self-portrait, a period when he styled himself as "the Mediterranean Carriére." He had come to share his father's admiration for this artist because of his Maternity, which was hanging on a wall in the family dining room. Dali's portrait of his grandmother is dominated by his quest for depicting the atmosphere. All brushstrokes have been eliminated in order to give preference to color and light. This canvas was painted during the summer: we can feel the heat penetrating the room, and the chiaroscuro is completely southern. To be logical the wall whose window opens on the wide bay should have been treated in a more somber tone. But when one knows the place and the intensity of the light from the sky reflected in the sea, it is easy to understand the perpetual state of dazzlement in which the painter was working, going from the landscape seen through the window to the grandmother seated in the semi-darkness blinded, he overexposed the zones of shadow.

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