The first known self-portrait by Dalí demonstrates his mastery of lush and impasto'd textures, abandoned in his mature paintings in favor of a rigorous and flatter technique that gives more importance to the drawing.

    This portrait, heretofore unpublished, was painted in Cadaqués in June 1920 at Sortell, an estate of the Pichots, who played a decisive role in Dalí's vocation.
    H. Josep Pichot - called Pepito - the best friend of Dalí's father, urged him to allow Salvador to paint. In Cadaqués it was customary to say "handsome and artistic like a Pichot." Luis and Ricardo Pichot, for instance, were musicians who formed, with the pianist Costa, a well-known chamber-music trio. In this picture, Ricardo is seated in the middle of the music room of "the house of the Italians," so named because one day his sister, the famous singer Maria Gaye, appeared there at a window and said to a too insistent Italian tenor, "In July, neither woman nor snails." Ricardo agreed to come to pose every morning for a week on condition that he could play his cello. An excellent performer, preferred pupil of Pablo Casals, and first-prize winner at the Paris Conservatory at the age of seventeen, he was eccentric in a superior way just like his brothers and sisters, practicing his violoncello in the midst of a flock of turkeys or on a boat in the Bay of Cadaqués. Here he wears raw-silk pajamas, rose-colored with a golden cast. Dalí still remembers these sittings during which, by playing a habancra, the cellist proved to him that in Rimsky-Korsakov there were already habaneras, and that in the Catalonian sardanas there was some Rimsky-Korsakov. Dalí states, "At their house during this period, I had seen a grand piano rise up among the rocks and in the moonlight I had heard concerts. Therefore, this is the reason that when I myself paint pianos on the rocks, or with cypress trees, it is not a reverie, these are things I have seen and which impressed me."
    In 1920 there was a change in Dalí's color harmonies. The impressionistic touch gave way to a technique closer to that used by Bonnard. In these pictures one can observe Dalí's care in rendering the exact color when one knows that the walls of the room were covered with a mixture of whitewash and a concoction of pine-bark el mangra which was used by the fishermen to protect their nets.

    From his earliest childhood Dali spent his vacations in Cadaqués. When we compare this landscape with another work painted at the same time, The Bathers on Llaner Beach, we feel the voluptuousness of a summer beside the Mediterranean Sea. Here the artist has painted the Llaner Beach in front of the family home, during the bathing hour. In the foreground his family, his aunt "la Tieta," and his sister, Ana-Maria, with some friends, the Salleras, are just returning from Mass. One of the family boats - the Dalis had two, Nebuchadnezzar and Wilson, the latter so named because at that time Salvador's father greatly admired the president of the United States - is still pulled up on the sandy beach, awaiting the afternoon boat ride. Dali remembers the houses with dry-stone walls which have since been torn down and the last rocky promontory, "la Punta den pampa, where one could see in the distance the village boys come to bathe in the nude. At noon this point was flesh pink." His sister, Ana-Maria, recalls that he had asked the group to pose in the landscape for a moment so that he could put the figures in the proper places on the canvas then and there, in oil, without a preliminary pencil sketch, working out the whole later in his studio. This canvas should be classed in the period when Dali was using the pointillistic technique of Seurat.