Salvador Dalí's melting clocks, the soft watches he painted in 1931 in The Persistence of Memory, show time going slack in sleep. They sag over what looks like his own sleeping face. By his own account, the idea came from a Camembert melting in the sun.
The Persistence of Memory is tiny, 24 by 33 centimeters. It shows an empty shore, and the golden cliffs in the distance are the coast of Catalonia, Dalí's home.
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The cheese is the part everyone remembers. It is also the part only Dalí ever vouched for.
He told the story in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, in 1942, eleven years after the painting, and he went on telling it for the rest of his life. It is a wonderful story, and I do not take it as a record.
A cheese does not explain the pale, boneless shape at the center of the canvas, which has a watch draped over it as others hang from the dead branch and the ledge. Its outline is not a rock's, and it has a closed eye.
The face under the watches
That shape is a distorted human face in profile, most likely Dalí's own. It is commonly read as an approximation of the painter's face, and it is the only thing in the landscape that is soft all the way through.
Watches gone soft over a sleeping face point to the irrelevance of time during sleep. I read the picture as a dream with the dreamer left in plain sight, Dalí lying at the center of his own Surrealist canvas.
The idea stayed with him. Ten years later, in Soft Self-Portrait with Grilled Bacon, shown above, his face sags in the same way. Yet one watch in the 1931 canvas never goes soft, and ants have already found it.
What You'll Discover
Why one watch refuses to melt.
What Dalí told a physicist about Einstein.
What Dalí did to the picture in 1954.