Sheherazade

Sheherazade is one of multiple paintings that Rene Magritte made on the theme of the titular storyteller from the Arabian Nights, whose role was to deliver such well-known tales as Aladdin and Ali Baba.

When an art-lover thinks of the surrealist movement, a number of names will spring immediately to mind. Amongst them must surely be that of Rene Magritte, the man who did the most to bring surrealism to the world of British art.

The background setting and other details vary from painting to painting, but each of Magritte's Sheherazade canvases have the same central motif: a female face, consisting of eyes and mouth, emerging from a pearl necklace.

The necklace is twined into a symmetrical pattern, apparently defying gravity as it twists from the surface. Along its way it forms three loops, each containing one of the woman's facial features.

The effect is slightly unnerving, as though the viewer is being observed through a hole in the canvas, or perhaps even a hole in reality itself. Such distortions of our perception of the world is a hallmark of the surrealist movement, of which Magritte is one of the most celebrated practitioners.

In this particular variation of the theme, the face appears atop a pale surface - the corner of a table, perhaps - with a sprig of leaves laying across it.

A blue curtain billows in the background, revealing a tranquil seascape and a soft, purple-hued sky. The setting is mundane, the sort of thing that we can expect to see in any number of undistinguished still-life paintings: attractively composed, but unremarkable.

Yet, into the middle of this everyday image, Rene Magritte has dropped the genuinely bizarre image of a face emerging from the hoops of a necklace.

This is an aspect of the surrealist aesthetic that Magritte used again and again across his paintings: the mundane being intruded upon by the weird and otherworldly.

The face of Sheherazade is simultaneously beautiful and disturbing, familiar and weird, classical and altogether modern. The perfect nexus of surrealism.

Like its legendary namesake, Sheherazade has no shortage of stories to tell. Any art-lover who hangs this image on their wall will certainly find their imagination inspired...