Dali Planet #11: The mill tower
A pure guess that this may be the mill tower that appears in many of Dali’s paintings, particularly from the 1930s. Perhaps it no longer exists, but the tower stood on the country estate of the Pichot family, which would have been about here, and Dali roamed the grounds in his youth, committing the landscape to canvas as early as 1914.
It was Ramon Pichot’s paintings that first spurred his interest in art, and Pepito Pichot persuaded Dali’s father to let the boy take lessons from the German portrait and landscape artist Siegfrid Burmann, who was staying in Cadaques at the time.
The tower resonated like a dream image in “The Dream Approaches” from 1933, on the left, and “The Tower” and “The Horseman of Death”, both from a year later, below. It’s a decrepit symbol of death as well as desire. In his autobiography Dali recalled the mill tower as the setting for his first sexual — and violent — urges toward a girl.
