The bay of Portlligat

The bay of Portlligat 

“This drawing [by John of the Cross] so impressed me the first time I saw it that later in California, in a dream, I saw the Christ in the same position, but in the landscape of Portlligat”[1].

Portlligat and, by extension, Cap de Creus, are places that the artist had known well since his childhood, and it was not for nothing that this was where the painter chose, together with Gala, to establish his only permanent residence, in which he had his studio. But above all Portlligat and its environs are where Dalí’s imaginary roamed, the places that we find depicted in the great majority of his works from every period.

Still today the rugged landscape of Portlligat conveys a certain poetry, a certain melancholy. This is a space in which a great calm prevails, yet at the same time it exudes an air of tension, and these are chief among the sensations we experience as we contemplate The Christ, thanks to the position of the son of God in contrast to the landscape spread out below him. As if Christ, in the sorrow of his sacrifice, had need of the silence, solitude and seclusion of this closed-in port.

For Dalí, Portlligat, its landscape, was what configured his world-a world which, during the years of exile in the United States, he painted from memory and which, after an absence of eight years, he needed to encounter again. This was a physical, organic need beyond aesthetic pleasure. Portlligat and the surrounding landscape were part of him as a person; more than that, they constitute one of the elements that forged the personality and emotions of the artist. Portlligat is the affective landscape that Dalí painted time and again. It is one of the constants in his work, one of the factors that have enabled it to become universal: “I need the localism of Portlligat just as Raphael needed the landscape of Urbino, to arrive at the universal by the path of what is particular”[2]. This is evidenced by the numerous works in which Portlligat is the setting we all recognise, just as the real landscape of Cap de Creus reminds us of the artist’s work.

And of note among the works in which the bay of Portlligat is clearly identifiable are those from the same creative period as The Christ. 

Landscape of Portlligat with familiar angels and fishermen

1950

Num. cat. P654

Private collection

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023

Landscape of Portlligat

1950

Num. cat. P655

The Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023

Dalí at the Age of Six, When He Thought He Was a Girl, Lifting the Skin of the Water to See a Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea

c. 1950

Num. cat. P653

Private collection, Paris

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023

The Angel of Portlligat

1952

Num. cat. P677

The Dalí Museum, St Petersburg (Florida)

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023

The Angel of Portlligat

1952

Num. cat. P675

Private collection

© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2023

The fishermen 

As his models, Dalí very often used people and objects that were very close to him, in the broadest sense of the term, physically and emotionally, and we can identify, in some of his works, local characters from Cadaqués, many of them fishermen. In the case of The Christ, the landscape is completed with a commonplace scene in the bay of fishermen working on the shore. However, for this canvas, Dalí imagined figures with a very specific origin: “I had also been tempted at first to take as a model, for the background, the fishermen of Portlligat, but in this dream, in the place of the fishermen of Portlligat there appeared, in a boat, the figure of a French peasant painted by Le Nain, of which only the face had changed to resemble a Portlligat fisherman. However, the fisherman, seen from the back, had a silhouette in the style of Velázquez”[3].

Carme Ruiz

The landscape of The Christ

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

© CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

Model for the fisherman. The 1943 book Velázquez by Enrique Lafuente Ferrari

Model for the fisherman in The Christ, c. 1951

A page from Velázquez with the reproduction of a sketch gone over in pencil

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

Model for the fisherman in The Christ. Postcard of Paysans devant leur Maison, Louis Le Nain (c. 1641-1642) 

Model for the fisherman in The Christ, c. 1951

Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres

  1. Tornar amunt
    Salvador Dalí, “A letter from Salvador Dalí”, The Scottish Art Review, vol. IV, no. 1, 1952, Glasgow, p. 5.
  2. Tornar amunt
     Translated from an interview by José Maria Massip, “Dalí hoy”, Destino, 01/04/1950, Barcelona.
  3. Tornar amunt
    Salvador Dalí, “A letter from Salvador Dalí”, op. cit, p. 5.