René Magritte's The Son of Man, painted in 1964, shows a man in an overcoat and bowler hat whose face is hidden by a floating green apple. Magritte meant it as a self-portrait. His own explanation fits in one sentence: everything we see hides another thing, and we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.
The man could be anyone on a Brussels street, and the apple removes the one feature that would say who he is. It is also the part people argue about. Eden, Newton, temptation: the guesses all treat the apple as a symbol invented for this picture.
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It was not invented for him. In 1952, twelve years earlier, Magritte had painted a single green apple so large that it fills an entire room, in The Listening Room, on a canvas only 45 by 55 centimeters.
In 1964 he painted another apple on its own and wrote under it Ceci n'est pas une pomme, "This is not an apple," the sentence he had once put under a pipe. The fruit on the man's face comes from that habit of painting an object and then denying it.
And the apple did not stop with the man in the bowler hat. Magritte's green apples have a history of their own, and it runs from a small canvas in 1952 to a record label in London.
Where did Magritte's apple come from?
From his own earlier pictures. The Listening Room is the plainest ancestor, and it is not alone. Apples also appear in The Postcard in 1960 and in The Married Priest in 1961. By 1964 Magritte had painted the fruit so often that it reached the man in the bowler hat as a habit, not a new symbol.
The Eden reading, then, is a guess laid over the picture. The sentence Magritte gave in a 1965 radio interview with Jean Neyens, printed in Harry Torczyner's Magritte: Ideas and Images, speaks only of the visible and the hidden. There is no garden in it, though the title he gave the picture is harder to explain away.
What You'll Discover
What the title borrows.
Who else wanted that green apple.
Who copied the man.
Where the canvas went.