.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from the Comité Magritte.
The present lot may be a sketch for an oil of the same name, painted by Magritte in 1959 (Sylvester, no. 897), itself a development of an oil from 1958 (Sylvester, no. 882). For much of the summer of 1958 Magritte had agonised over the problem of how to show a chair in a painting, concluding in September 1958 that the solution should include a lion’s tail protruding from the back of the chair. In the subsequent, 1959 work, the tail, as in the present lot, protrudes from the front of the chair, which Sylvester suggests may be an explicit play on words by Magritte of the double meaning of ‘queue’ (‘penis’ as well as ‘tail’).
The present lot may be a sketch for an oil of the same name, painted by Magritte in 1959 (Sylvester, no. 897), itself a development of an oil from 1958 (Sylvester, no. 882). For much of the summer of 1958 Magritte had agonised over the problem of how to show a chair in a painting, concluding in September 1958 that the solution should include a lion’s tail protruding from the back of the chair. In the subsequent, 1959 work, the tail, as in the present lot, protrudes from the front of the chair, which Sylvester suggests may be an explicit play on words by Magritte of the double meaning of ‘queue’ (‘penis’ as well as ‘tail’).