Dali House

In Dali’s youth his family had a summer home in Cadaques, along the Platja LLane, perhaps at the foot of what is now Drecera de Dali. The photo comes from VirTourist.com and the painting here is “The Artist’s Father at Llana Beach”, from 1920.

In 1907 Dali’s sister Ana Maria was born. Seen below in his 1924 portrait, she would be almost the only female model in his paintings until he met his wife Gala in 1929. In 1949 Anna published a memoir, “Dali as Seen by His Sister”.

Dali recalled the excitement in the household when Halley’s comet appeared in 1910. “While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.”

That same year he entered the Immaculate Conception primary school, run by the Brothers of the Marist Order, who taught him to speak French.

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.

Baby Salvador was baptised at Sant Pere’s Church on Plaza l’Esglesia in Figueras, a structure built in the 14th century atop a far more ancient church.

In his autobiography, Dali wrote of flinging another little boy off a suspension bridge when he was just five years old, and that same year watching a dying bat being eaten by ants (one source says the bat was his pet). He put it in his mouth, ants and all, and bit it almost in half. Ants showed up in his artwork for the rest of his life. The painting here is “Freud’s Perverse Polymorph (Bulgarian Child Eating a Rat)” from 1939.

At age six, Dali painted a landscape and fancied himself an artist, but by the following year he’d decided he wanted to be Napoleon instead. In the drawing room of the family home was a small keg of tea that bore the emperor’s image. The picture, Dali wrote in his autobiography, “meant everything to me. I wished to sip Napoleon’s liquid!”