Dali House

“Portrait of Frau Isabel Styler-Tas (Melencolia)” from 1945 is at Berlin’s Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz Neue Nationalgalerie (the New National Gallery). A Guardian critic once commented about it, “a typically egregious example of surrealist hackery … and yet you can’t help liking this picture”.

There are several once-prominent individuals who the Internet has never heard of apart from the portraits of them by Dali. As well as Helena Rubinstein and the Warners of Hollywood, he did Katharina Cornell, Mrs Harrison Williams, a Mr and Mrs Fagan, Ruth Daponte, speedboat racer “The Duke of Urbino (Portrait of Count Theo Rossi Di Montelera)” and, below, railroad titan and arts patron “Chester Dale and His Dog Coco” and Greek shipping magnate John Theodoracopoulos flank “Bobo” Rockefeller, although for some reason the last, begun in 1960, was never finished.