The Son of Man is a self-portrait that René Magritte painted in 1964. It shows a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat, with a green apple floating in front of his face. Magritte said the picture was about what is hidden: everything we see hides another thing, and we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
He died three years later, in 1967. The canvas belongs to a private collector, so nearly everyone who knows the image has seen it only in reproduction.
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The apple hides the face only partly. Magritte said so himself in a 1965 radio interview with Jean Neyens: "At least it hides the face partly."
The man's eyes show above the edge of the fruit, between the apple and its leaves. He sees us. We get an apple.
That is not how the picture is usually described. I read it as the portrait of a man who watches, not of one who hides. So why would a painter make a self-portrait and hold back his own face?
Who asked Magritte for a self-portrait?
A lawyer named Harry Torczyner. Accounts of the painting's origin differ on the details, but they agree on the client, an American of Belgian origin who had asked Magritte for a self-portrait.
Torczyner was a friend and adviser of the painter, and the most prolific of his correspondents. He ended up owning the canvas. The 1965 radio interview about the apple is quoted from his book Magritte: Ideas and Images, in Richard Millen's English translation.
The man in the picture was a familiar type. A bowler hat appears in Golconda in 1953, The Masterpiece in 1955, The Ready-Made Bouquet in 1957 and The Spirit of Adventure in 1962, and it was still there in Decalcomania in 1966. This time the man under the hat was the painter.
So the client who asked for a portrait received a man with an apple in front of his face, and a title that refers to Jesus.
What You'll Discover
What the title never explained.
The other faces he covered that year.
What is wrong with the man's arm.
The rare times it is lent out.