Dalí's brother, also named Salvador, died at the age of two, a year before his birth. He looked very like his dead brother and said that his "forced identification with a dead person meant that my true image of my own body was of a decaying, rotting, soft, wormy corpse ...". This is the only painting Dalí did of his brother, although the boy is older than his real brother was before he died. Dalí felt that he was exorcizing the spirit of his brother with this painting.
    The face of the boy is created by a dot matrix, a technique that was widely used in the Pop Art period of the Sixties. This technique emphasizes the ghost-like quality of the boy, he is insubstantial, yet his presence fills the landscape. The boy's hair also forms part of the wings of a crow; a bird often viewed as a harbinger of death. Beneath the boy is a miniature depiction of Millet's The Angelus. Dalí believed that through an X-ray of The Angelus, it would be proved that the basket over which the couple are praying was initially the coffin for a child.

Dalí attached great importance to this picture, composed like a Baroque apotheosis. Once again we see the couple from Millet's The Angelus.

    Among Dalí's masterworks of the 1960s, Tuna-Fishing occupies, along with The Hallucinogenic Toreador, the most prominent place. It took two full summers, in 1966 and 1967, for Dalí to finish this canvas swarming with Dionysiac figures. Tuna-Fishing is the result of forty years of passionate experiments in pictorial research.
    The artist has brought together in this great canvas painted in Port Lligat all his tendencies: Surrealism, "quintessential pompierism," pointillism, action painting, tachisme, geometric abstraction, Pop, Op and psychedelic art. He has summarized his studied purpose in this work which proves itself to be as significant as his unforgettable painting The Persistence of Memory of 1931 in The Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Tuna-Fishing is the most ambitious picture I have painted because it bears as a subtitle Homage to Meissonier. It is the reactualization of painting with a subject, underesteemed by all except the Surrealist group during the entire period called 'Avant-garde Art.' This epic topic was related to me by my father who, although a notary in Figueras in Catalonia, possessed a narrative gift worthy of Homer. He had shown me in his desk, at the same time, an engraving by a Swedish 'pompier' artist depicting tuna-fishing, which I also used in working out this oil. But, finally, I decided on this subject, which had tempted me all my life, after having read in Teilhard de Chardin that, according to him, the universe and the cosmos were probably limited, which has been confirmed by the latest scientific discoveries. I realized then that it is precisely this limitation, contraction, and limit to the cosmos and the universe which makes energy possible. Therefore, the protons, anti-protons, photons, pi-mesons, neutrons, all the elementary particles only possess this formidable hyperaesthetic energy because of these same limits and contractions of the universe. This, in a certain way, relieves us of the terrible anguish stemming from Pascal's theory that human beings were insignificant beside the cosmos, and brings us back to the idea that all the cosmos and all the universe converge in one point, which, in the present case, is the Tuna-Fishing. This accounts for the terrifying energy in this picture! Because all these fish, all those tuna, all the human beings in the act of killing them, personify the limited universe. In other words, since the Dalínian cosmos is limited to the space in the tuna-fishing, all the elements acquire from it the maximum of hyperaesthetic energy. The Tuna-Fishing is, therefore, a biological spectacle par excellence since, according to my father's description, the sea - which is cobalt blue and ends up being completely red with blood - is the superaesthetic force of modern biology. All births are preceded by a marvelous spurting of blood, blood is sweeter than honey. And it is to America in our era that the prerogative of blood belongs, since America's honor is thanks to Watson, the Nobel Prize winner, who was the first to find the molecular structure of dioxyribonucleic acid, which, along with the atomic bomb, is for Dalí the most hopeful future sign of afterlife and hibernation."

    This large vertical composition was begun in Port Lligat in 1968 and finished in 1970, when it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. A. Reynolds for the Salvador Dalí Museum in Cleveland, to be hung along with their other works already assembled there.
    The double image appearing in the center of this work is that of the Venus de Milo repeated several times from different angles in such a way that the shadows form the features of a toreador whose coat of lights is made up of the corpuscles obtained through the multiplication of dots and of flies, mingled with the corpuscular image of the dying bull. Dalí's first obsession with the Venus de Milo was in 1936, when he transformed a plaster replica into Venus de Milo with Drawers, putting drawers in her body and in her forehead. He told me [Robert Descharnes] recently that he had practically not touched the original plaster, on which he had only marked where the drawers should be. It was Marcel Duchamp, creator of the ready-made, who undertook the production of the model.
    Here, it was in the Venus de Milo reproduced on the cover of a box of pencils of a well-known brand that Dalí instantly saw the face of a toreador appear. The architecture of the arena lighted by the shadows of the sun at five o'clock in the afternoon, the hour of the bullfight, is a mixture of classical Spanish arenas with Palladian structures seen in Italy and the porticoes in the old, ruined theater in Figueras before it was transformed into the Teatro-Museo Dalí.
    As a whole, this painting can be viewed as the most comprehensive, single retrospective painting of Dalí's career. It incorporates elements from Dalí's Catalan culture, his religious upbringing, and many other specific elements of his life. Dalí conceived the idea for this painting while in an art supply store. In the body of Venus, on a box of pencils of that brand name, he saw the face of the toreador. This is a double image painting that repeats the image of the Venus de Milo several times in such a way that the shadows form the features of a toreador.
    The toreador's face is imposed on the middle Venus. The face is tilted, the lips are slanted, and the right breast of Venus makes up the toreador's nose. Starting with the button at the waist of the second Venus to the left, transform that area into a collar button and man's collar. The green skirt of the Venus becomes the toreador's tie. Her abdomen becomes his chin, while her midriff and left breast make up the most of the rest of his face. The right side of her face become the toreador's eye, which is shedding a tear for the dying bull. The arena at the top makes up the toreador's hat. The toreador appears again in the figure outlined in yellow with arms raised in dedication of the bull to Gala. She appears in the upper left hand corner surrounded by yellow. Dalí painted Gala with a frown because she disliked bullfights.
    The tear in the eye (at the nape of Venus' neck) is shed for the dying bull. The legendary flies of St. Narrciso (said to come from the tomb of St. Narrciso whenever any foreign power tried to invade Spain) are shown first realistically and then more symbolically where they merge into the details of the toreador's cape. At the top of the painting, the flies suggest the small black balls of thread that were once sewn to the hair nets worn by the toreador's in the time of Goya, and still persist in the black over-aprons of the old women of rural Spain. The colored spheres are reminiscent of those on the spires of the cathedral "Sagrada Familia" by Antonio Gaudi. They also refer to Optical Art, as the spheres create a 3-D cube.
    The image of the dying bull emerges from the rocky terrain of Cape Creus that appears just below the toreador's cape. A large fly makes up the eye. What might at first appear to be a pool of blood beneath the bull is really a translucent bay. On this bay a woman appears on a yellow raft. This seeming incongruity symbolizes the 'modern tourists' invasion of Cape Creus which even the flies of St. Narrciso have been unable to halt! Dalí once remarked that he was not too worried about the profanation of his beloved Cape Creus because its rocks would "eventually vanquish the French tourists and time would destroy the litter they leave everywhere".
    In the center foreground at the bottom of the painting, a dog appears made up of expressionistic flecks of color that could be reflections from the water. This dog was derived from a 1966 photograph by Ronald C. James showing a Dalmatian. The dog was removed, but the spots remained. This photo addressed the same issue that concerned Dalí in all of his double images: how much visual information is needed to recognize a shape? This dog also brings one back to the 1923 painting Cadaqués with its dog in the same spot, showing the breadth of Dalí's art and genius. Finally, often barely visible in even the best color scans of this work, in the lower left corner, Dalí signs his own retrospective with a small figure of himself as a boy. He's wearing his favorite blue sailor suit, and playing with his favorite toys, a hoop and a fossilized bone.