René Magritte

A painter of ordinary things made strange

Rene Magritte was born in Lessines, in the Belgian province of Hainaut, in 1898 and died in Brussels in 1967. He grew up in provincial Belgium, studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels, and spent years designing wallpaper and drawing advertisements before painting could support him. His mother drowned herself in the Sambre when he was a boy, a fact his biographers have leaned on heavily and which he himself dismissed as any kind of explanation of his art.

His pictures are painted flatly and without visible bravura, in the manner of a competent commercial illustrator, and their strangeness lies entirely in what they show rather than in how they are handled. A pipe captioned with the statement that it is not a pipe. A man in a bowler hat whose face is hidden by a hovering green apple. A window at dusk beneath a bright daytime sky. A locomotive steaming out of a domestic fireplace. He wanted the familiar object placed where it could not be, and he wanted the paint itself to make no comment at all.

Brussels rather than Paris

He spent a short and unhappy period near the Breton circle in Paris, quarrelled with them, and returned to Brussels, where he stayed for the rest of his life, painting in the dining room of an ordinary flat, dressed like a clerk, walking his dog. During the German occupation he produced a deliberately bright period in the manner of Renoir, and later a coarse and aggressive phase that dismayed his dealers, before returning to the manner everyone recognises. Recognition abroad arrived late but decisively, and by the time he died his imagery had been absorbed into advertising, record sleeves and cinema to a degree matched by almost no other painter of his generation. Tate holds several of his paintings, among them The Reckless Sleeper, The Annunciation and Man with a Newspaper.

What a specialist examines

Very little that carries his name at auction is a painting. The market is dominated by prints, and the decisive question is when a sheet was made. A small number of lithographs were produced during his lifetime. Far more were issued after his death, printed in Paris by Mourlot and elsewhere, some as portfolios and some as single sheets, and many are signed in pencil not by the artist but by his widow Georgette Magritte, or annotated as artist's proofs aside from the edition. The trade catalogues these honestly as being after Magritte, and they sell for a small fraction of a lifetime work.

A specialist therefore records the publisher, the paper, the edition size and the impression number, and above all who signed the sheet and in what medium. A complete portfolio with its title page, text, justification and original folder is worth considerably more than the sum of its loose plates: a full set of twelve lithographs published by Fernand Mourlot made a strong four figure sum in sterling at Bonhams in 2006, while a single posthumous lithograph carrying his widow's signature made a middling three figure sum in dollars at the same house in 2024. Condition questions are the ordinary ones for large colour lithographs, namely light staining, creasing at the margins and fading, and fading matters disproportionately in a body of work built on skies.

A note on the sheets at this house

The lithographs offered here are dated to the year after the artist's death and belong to that posthumous editioned group rather than to his painted work. They should be read and valued as such.