The Belgian artist René Magritte (1890-1967) was a Surrealist painter famous for bizarre images depicted in a realistic manner. Many of his paintings showed a dignified gentleman in a bowler hat.

The Belgian painter René François Chislain Magritte in 1940 praised "that pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial," and his career bore out this aesthetic strategy. Born in Lessines, Belgium, on November 21, 1890, he would become a chief proponent of representational Surrealism. By the age of 12 he began drawing and painting and attended informal art classes in Chatelet, where his family then resided. A chance encounter with a plein-air painter inspired the budding artist.

In 1912 Magritte's mother drowned herself, and the family moved to Charleroi shortly after the tragedy. At age 15, at the local fair, he met a girl named Georgette Berger, and though he would not see her again until 1920 the two...