A shoe in a painting works like a label that gives a person's rank, trade, faith or reputation before the face does.
The twelve works on this list, painted between 1434 and 1980, from Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait to Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes, each build the picture around a shoe, a heel, a bare foot or an empty pair.
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How These Were Chosen
Each work had to pass at least one of two tests. In the first, the shoes or bare feet show where someone stands in society, rich, privileged or poor. In the second, the footwear has come apart from the body: kicked off, left on a floor or standing empty.
12. René Magritte, The Red Model (1935)
The list opens with a picture in which the foot and the shoe are the same thing. In René Magritte's The Red Model, two bare feet stand on pebbly ground in front of a wall of rough planks.
Look at them from the toes up. The front half is flesh, with toes and toenails, and from the instep up the feet become a pair of laced leather boots, with no seam where the skin turns into leather.
Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist, painted this canvas in 1935, and the image stayed with him for decades. He painted seven versions between 1935 and 1964, and this one is now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In 1938, in a lecture called La ligne de vie, The Line of Life, he explained what he was after. Thanks to The Red Model, he said, we feel that "the union of a human foot and a leather shoe arises in reality from a monstrous custom."
The custom is wearing shoes at all. A shoe is the skin of a dead animal laced around a living foot, and Magritte said so, speaking of "the proximity of dead and living skin." In his picture, the two skins simply merge.
Magritte also reused his own canvases, and one version shows it. A second canvas from 1935, bought in 1967 by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, was painted over an older picture.
An X-ray made in 2013 found, under the feet and boots, a column and the lower half of a female figure. They come from The Enchanted Pose, a 1927 canvas of two identical nude women that Magritte had cut up and reused.
A third version was made for a ballroom. In early 1937 the English collector Edward James invited Magritte to London and commissioned it, and that canvas is now at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
James set it into the wall of his London ballroom as the left panel of a triptych, a picture in three parts. Each canvas sat behind a two-way mirror, so the dancers saw only their own reflection until lights behind the glass were switched on and the paintings appeared.
After a ball on April 18, 1937, James wrote that "the human boots struck a chord in the young dancing couples in their capitalist heels." His rich young guests, dancing in expensive evening shoes, suddenly faced feet that had turned into boots.
Meanwhile the first canvas, the one now in Paris, had gone to New York. It was shown in 1936 at the gallery of the dealer Julien Levy, and Maria Martins later bought it on the advice of her companion, Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamp was the French artist who had turned everyday objects, such as a urinal, into works of art, and he did not forget the boots. In 1945 André Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, was preparing a new edition of his book Surrealism and Painting.
On July 2, 1945, Duchamp sent him an idea for its cover: "Take the bare feet, Magritte's shoes." The New York bookseller and publisher Brentano's brought out the book that year, with The Red Model on the cover.
At a Glance
Artist: René Magritte (1898 to 1967)
Painted: 1935
Medium: Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard
Where to see it: Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris. Other versions belong to the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
About This Painting
How big is The Red Model?
The Red Model in Paris measures 56 by 46 centimeters. The Stockholm canvas is taller, at 72 by 48.5 centimeters.
When did the Centre Pompidou buy The Red Model?
The Red Model entered the Centre Pompidou's collection in 1975. Paris had first seen it at the Salon d'Automne of 1944.
How large is the version of The Red Model made for Edward James?
The Red Model III measures 183 by 136 centimeters, far bigger than the 1935 canvases. In the ballroom it hung with two other Magritte paintings, On the Threshold of Liberty and Youth Illustrated.
Where was The Red Model first reproduced?
The Red Model was printed in The American Weekly, a New York newspaper supplement, on 1 March 1936.
11. Johannes Vermeer, The Love Letter (c. 1669 to 1670)
Through a dark doorway, we look into a bright room with a black and white tiled floor. A woman in a yellow jacket trimmed with fur sits there with a stringed instrument on her lap.
She looks up at her maid, who has just handed her a letter. Johannes Vermeer painted the scene in Delft around 1669 to 1670, and he keeps the viewer outside, behind a heavy curtain pulled aside at the top right.
Before the eye reaches the two women, it has to cross the dark room in front of them. There, nearest to us and half lost in shadow, lies the reason this painting earns its place on a list about shoes.