This analytical work is one of the first painted in the new house in Port Lligat during the summer Of 1930. In his numerous written works Dalí has given us much information about this picture. "A month after my return from Paris," he writes, "I signed a contract with George Keller and Pierre Colle. Shortly after in the latter's gallery I exhibited my Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion, fruit of my contemplation at Cape Creus." The Viscount of Noailles bought this oil. Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion must be considered the most important painting after The Invisible Man among Dalí's early experiments with double images. The permanent theme which predominates over all the others is that of the persistence of desires.
    Speaking of this picture, Dalí has given a definition: "The double image (the example of which may be that of the image of the horse alone which is at the same time the image of a woman) can be prolonged, continuing the paranoiac process, the existence of another obsessive idea being then sufficient to make a third image appear (the image of a lion, for example) and so forth, until the concurrence of a number of images, limited only by the degree of the capacity for paranoiac thought." The violently erotic character of the group of fellateurs metamorphosed into the forelegs and the head of the horse is veiled by the immutable aspect of the ensemble, obtained with the help of an absence of dense shadows and violent colors, as well as by the geological character of the forms. Dalí said of these models: "They are always boats which seem to be drawn by exhausted fishermen, by fossil fishermen."
    Dalí painted three pictures of the same subject with different titles. One of the three was destroyed during the demonstrations which broke out when the film L'Age dor was being shown at Studio 28 in Paris on December 3, I930.

   One year before The Persistence of Memory, a soft watch made its first appearance. The scene's desolation contrasts with the dynamic character associated with a railway station, thus converting it into a metaphysical landscape like the ones that often appear in Dalí's works of the early thirties.

   In one of the best examples of de Chirico's influence, the shadow projected by an enigmatic figure outside the picture is a hovering menace, as is the ball in unstable equilibrium. The couple, emblem of love and death, and the lion's head also appear in The Great Masturbator, 1929 and other canvases of the same period.

    By the Thirties, Surrealist painting had moved toward the arena of dreams for inspiration and relied less on the ideas of automatism that had marked the beginning of the movement. The Dream was painted in 1931 but the main image, the woman's head, had first appeared the year before in The Fountain, where, although in the background, it was a striking and dominant feature. Dalí found the inspiration for the woman from a scene on a box and a monument in Barcelona.
    In the foreground of this dark painting is the bust of a woman, painted in dull, metallic grays, her hair floating above her as if frozen in movement. The colors used and her apparent immobility bring to mind the Classical myth of Medusa. The woman has no mouth and her eyes also appear sealed shut, like those of the giant head in Sleep. The absence of a mouth, together with the seeming immobility of the woman implies a loss of control, of paralysis. Ants crawl across the face in the place where a mouth should be. As a child, Dalí had found a pet bat crawling with ants and so, for him, they became symbols of death and decay.

    Gradiva Finds the Ruins of Anthropomorphis was based on a German story, analyzed by Freud, of an archeologist who falls in love with Gradiva, a girl he sees in a Greek stone relief. He later finds his true love, who is the reincarnation of Gradiva. The Surrealists took this myth for their own. For them, Gradiva meant "she who advances", a woman who would lead to self-discovery. To Dalí, Gradiva was Gala, the realization of his fictional past loves and his muse.
    In Gradiva Finds the Ruins, Dalí plays with the story of Gradiva. Set against a flat, dark landscape, she is in the foreground with her arms wrapped around a human shape that is made from stone, (Anthropomorphis). Parts of the figure are cracked and there are holes where the face, heart and genitals should be, implying that this creature is without any of the parts that constitute a human. The form of Anthropomorphis is similar to that of a figure, which can be interpreted as Dalí, in the painting Solitude (1931). The figure has a Dalínian inkwell on his shoulder and as Gradiva appears as Gala, the implication here is that Dalí is Anthropomorphis.

    Le Spectre et le Fantome - the spectre and the phantom - is one of a series of paintings that shared a theme of spectral and phantom appearances. In a letter to the French Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, Dalí defined the clouds and the rainbow as being the spectre and the brick shape as being the phantom. The clouds take on forms as the viewer stares at them, reflecting the basis of Dalí's paranoia-critical method.
    The work has the same female figure as Mediumistic-Paranoaic Image. The woman is in the foreground, sitting in a puddle on a beach. She is a combination of Dalí's nurse, his friend Lidia and another of Dalí's obsessions from that time which was to cause him trouble in the future: Hitler. His obsession with Hitler was partly caused by what he called the "soft flesh" of his back, which was tightly held in by his uniform. He dreamt of him as a wet nurse sitting knitting in a puddle. The woman in the painting has a small cut taken out of her back that emphasizes this obsession with "Hitlerian" flesh.

    Dalí painted portraits through most of his career, starting with his family in his earlier years and quickly moving on to paying subjects when he realized the demand that there was for his work. Other members of the Surrealist group criticized Dalí for choosing to paint portraits of paying customers. They saw such work as lowering creative standards, believing that artists should only paint what inspired them, despite a long tradition of portrait painting.
    As was often the case for Dalí, this portrait is set against a Catalan landscape of a desert with hills in the far distance. There are other images that are typical of Dalí, such as the domed building without a center and the man sitting on a rearing horse.
    Mme. Reese stands against this background, lit up by rays of light from the dense cloud above her. She is dressed up in a ball gown and wearing pearls, suggesting that she is one of the wealthy elite that Dalí often painted. The portrait is conventional, unlike the slightly Surrealist Portrait of Mrs. Jack Warner.

   This is a whole catalogue of Dalí's images. Cherries represent "the mystery of bifurcation"; ants crawling on sheet music are a symbol of mortality. Busts of Lenin on the piano come from a twilight hallucination, according to the painter's account, that presented itself to him one morning on waking.

    Many of Dalí's paintings were influenced and inspired by the landscapes of his youth. Several in particular were painted on the slopes of Mount Pani, which was covered in beautiful umbrella pines at the time. Many of the strange and foreboding shadows in the foreground of many Dalí paintings is a direct reference to and result of Dalí's love of this mountain near his home. Even long after he had grown up, Dalí continued to paint details of the landscape of Catalonia into his works, as evidenced by such works as The Persistence of Memory, completed in 1931.
    Note the craggy rocks of Cape Creus in the background to the right. One of Dalí's most memorable Surrealist works, indeed the one with which he is most often associated is The Persistence of Memory. It shows a typical Dalínian landscape, with the rocks of his beloved Cape Creus jutting up in the background. In the foreground, a sort of amorphous self portrait of Dalí seems to melt. Three Separate Melting Watch images even out the foreground of the work. The melting watches are one symbol that is commonly associated with Salvador Dalí's Surrealism. They are literally meant to show the irrelevance of time.
    When Dalí was alone with Gala and his paintings in Cape Creus, he felt that time had little, perhaps no significance for him. His days were spent eating, painting, making love, and anything else he wanted to do. The warm, summery days seemed to fly by without any real indication of having passed.
    One hot August afternoon, in 1931, as Dalí sat at his work bench nibbling at his lunch, he came upon one of his most stunning paranoiac-critical hallucinations. Upon taking a pencil, and sliding it under a bit of Camembert cheese, which had become softer and runnier than usual in the summer heat, Dalí was inspired with the idea for the melting watches. They appear often throughout Dalí's works, and are the subject of much interest. In short, this particular work, is an important referral back to Dalí's Catalan Heritage, that was so very important to him.

    The obsessive character of this work is made evident by one of the less important elements and the least noticed by the viewer: the measureless shadow which is spread out in the bottom part of the canvas. Its obsessional power is obtained by having in the center a rock whose shadow is much less dense that that of the one in the foreground. In appearance this reef seems to be a rock like the others; however, it is already constructed in such a way that its shadow bears a resemblance, due to its design, to the one in the foreground. Their source is moreover quite different, and it is there that the painter has successfully applied his famous paranoiac-critical method.
    The shadow in the foreground is that of a concert grand piano, an instrument which holds a predominant place in many of Dalí's Surrealist compositions, such as Diurnal Illusion: the Shadow of a Grand Piano Approaching, 1931; Average Bureaucrat; Six apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano, 1931; or Myself at the Age of Ten When I Was a Grasshopper Child, 1933. This piano is "the one that belonged to the Pichots with its shadows," Dalí relates; "I was impressed by these shadows in the setting sun, near the tall cypress in the interior court of the house, and another time when they had brought the instrument onto the rocks beside the water." The spectral victory standing in the lower-right corner of the picture is concealing heteroclite objects, half-hidden under the drapery in whose tortured folds the figure is wrapped. Two of these things, a glass and a shoe, are used with the same impact to stretch out the skin on the back of the figure in Diurnal Illusion. Speaking of his fetishism, Dalí has said, "It was a question of all the fetishes and slippers of my childhood fossilized underneath the membranes of my anguish, all mimetized at Cap Creus." Shoe fetishes appear often in scenes of "bureaucratic cannibalism," where one can see the most varied figures: a girl, Nietzche, or Maxim Gorky devouring a high-heeled shoe.

    Dalí had many different ways of signing a painting; sometimes using an emblem or a crown. They Were There is signed "Gala Dalí"; he had begun signing his work with both his and Galas names in 1931. Dalí said that this was because it was mostly with Gala's blood that he painted. The signature on this painting was made with blood-red paint to emphasize this point.
    They Were There is a portrait, though the subject is unknown. The man stands in the foreground staring straight out at the viewer, which was unusual for Dalí's portraits. He appears relaxed with one hand in the pocket of his casual suit, a cigarette in the other hand. The background of the painting is the usual desert, bounded by green hills. The man on the rearing horse is an image also seen in Mme. Reese. They Were There does not show Dalí's usual eye for the miniature details, the trees in the background are basic and little effort seems to have been taken over the clouds either. In both Mme. Reese and They Were There the brushwork on the people is very smooth; there are no wrinkles or lines, giving an almost plastic quality.

   The infinite prolongation of the handle of a teaspoon that contains a small object, as if an offering - in this case, a tiny watch - is repeated in other pictures by Dalí. The novelty here lies in the warping of the handle to avoid an enigmatic obstacle.