Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish painter associated with Surrealism, known for meticulously rendered dreamlike imagery. Born in Figueres, Catalonia, he trained at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, then joined the Surrealist circle in Paris in the late 1920s. His works include "The Persistence of Memory" (1931), with its soft, melting clocks. He developed a self-styled "paranoiac-critical" method and worked across painting, printmaking, sculpture, film, and design. He spent the 1940s in the United States — first at Hampton Manor in Virginia, then principally on California's Monterey Peninsula — before returning to Catalonia. In his final decades he established the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, where he was later buried.