Although Dalí did not date the The Girl of Figueras, it was probably painted in 1926, as the style, both of the brushwork and the content, are comparable to other paintings of this period. The Portrait of my Father, painted a year earlier, shows similar strong lines and structure of form; both figures in these paintings are depicted with a solidity of presence.
    The woman in the painting is Ana Maria, as was usual during this period. Due to the subject of the The Girl of Figueras, the painting can be seen as an early attempt by Dalí to re-work The Lacemaker. The painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeers, became an obsession with Dalí during the Fifties.
    Ana Maria sits sewing on a balcony. As with other paintings of Ana Maria at this time, she is turned away from the viewer so that her face can not be seen. The balcony overlooks the town of Figueres, Dalí's home town. The blue color of the distant mountains and of the sky contrasts with the sunlit stone of the buildings to capture the viewer's eye. This blue is repeated in the shimmering blue-black hair of Ana Maria.

    In this large painting dated 1927 - painted in Figueras, following experiments started in Madrid as early as the end of 1921 - the influence of the masters of Cubism is perfectly visible, particularly that of Juan Gris, for whom Dali has always manifested the keenest admiration. He considers the Madrilenian painter the greatest of all the Cubists, and he acknowledges Picasso's title as the giant of our times, but rather for his vital genius as a destroyer and his certain way of seeing with a painter's eye than for his painterly qualities, even if these are exceptional.
    This painting was given the title Barcelonese Mannequin later. The female figure was inspired by a young girl of Figueras, Ramoneta Montsalvatje, who was one of a small group of friends. She was very pretty and personified elegance, evoking for Dali the memory of the mannequins and women of the world in Barcelona and Madrid. This is evident in the treatment of the feet and the shoes, especially the one in front; attention must also be called to the appearance of the fish-sex, a theme used frequently later on by the Surrealists. At this time Dali had already had the opportunity to see the paintings of post-Cubist artists in the pages of magazines to which he had subscriptions (such as L'Amour de l'art, L'Art d'aujourd'hul', L'Art vivant, Revista de occidente, L'Esprit nouveau, Studium, Museum, D'Aci d'alla, La Gaseta de les arts, L'Amic de les arts, Variete, Der Querschnitt). Most of the Cubist canvases of the years 1926 and 1927, such as Barcelonese Mannequin, a self-portrait entitled Harlequin, and also Still Life by the Light of the Moon are all very large oils.

   Dalí still uses a Cubist scenario to introduce elements of Surrealist ancestry, like the head/vase on the table, or the fish, oddly similar to the neck of the guitar. The moon, an image that appears repeatedly in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, seems to be a direct allusion to the writer by means of the feather leading our eye to it through two lines bisecting at a right angle.

    One of the first things that people often notice about this work is the texture of the foreground, or the strange shape of the main figure in the center of the painting. Both of these represent radical departures for Dalí, and in fact, this painting marks the start of Dalí's Transitional Period during the year of 1928.
    The work is a continuation of the theme presented in Beigneuse except that Dalí has reduced the figure to a single distorted big toe. Off the coastline, Dalí creates a stylized rendering of the Ise of Farnera, which lies off the coast of Port Lligat.
    Unfortunately for Dalí, the reaction against both Beigneuse and this work were somewhat hostile, and caused his father much distress. Although he has supported his son through his studies at the Academy, the senior Dalí still hoped that his son would pursue a more traditional occupation.
    The strange figures and use of multimedia in this work precede Dalí's even more outrageous Surrealist works, but are marked by a period of increased stress between Dalí and his father which was to climax in their eventual 20+ year rift over his lover Gala Eluard in 1929.

    Dali's bestiary broke loose from reality at the end of 1926 to become altogether fantastic during 1928, which marked a very important period of transition in the painter's work. This picture is part of a series in which the influence of Max Ernst is clearly visible, more particularly so in a painting such as La Belle Saison in the Urvater collection in Brussels.
    However, Max Ernst's influence is only superficial. Dali used it momentarily, with others, because at that time, already, trying to transcribe his dreams, he took advantage of this material just as he made use of the Mediterranean sand and gravel that he glued to the surfaces of the picture. Let's make no mistake about it, in the works of this Mediterranean painter from the north of Spain, the monsters are nothing at all like those which, driven mad by the silent darkness of the nordic forests, spring up in the works of Hieronymus Bosch and all German civilization.
    In a taped interview, speaking of the baroque, Dali said: "The luminosity of the rough part of the seashells from the grottoes of the Mediterranean gave birth to the grotesque, succeeding in thus making the joyous light of its own roots and its most obscure branches burst forth. While the monsters of Bosch are the products of music, of the forest, of the gothic, of obscurantism, the grotesque figures in Raphael come directly from Pompeii, from humanism and Mediterranean intelligence; all the grotesque beings of Bosch are only a protest: it's the indigestion that the knights had upon returning from the Crusades! A Pantagruelian way of protesting against the Greco-Roman humanism. The grotesque figures painted by Raphael in the Vatican, on the contrary, are the affirmation of this intelligence, of this humanism, a way of dominating the monsters. With Raphael it is the conquest of the irrational, while the monsters of Bosch are conquered by the irrational. There's the whole difference. And I myself am the anti-Hieronymus Bosch. Let us succeed in making monsters but may they be completely antagonistic and dissimilar! Dali, he is pure Mediterranean!"
    All the pictures with collage of gravel and sand were painted at Cadaqués. The principal ones are Unsatisfied Desires, Bathers, and Thumb. "The interesting thing in this Bird," Dali has said, "is that with its side already monstrous, it carries in its entrails a thing which is a foetus and instead of the foetus being that of a bird, it's a cat! The moon is there as in many other canvases of this period." Going on, apropos the influence of Max Ernst, he has stated, "It is not the analogies which afford interest but the dissimilarities, even if I used a painting by Max Ernst. In the same way, the Phedra of Euripides becomes exactly the opposite when dealt with by Racine. In this picture it is the same thing instead of seeing an analogy with Max Ernst one should see what is absolutely the contrary. According to me, I perhaps take something of Max Ernst as a point of departure, but because of my Mediterranean heritage and my almost scientific side, I create with the elements torn from the soil of Cadaqués - that is, from the Mediterranean - a bird which carries an animal inside it, a monster which has nothing to do with the lucubrations of the Germans. In general, the critics see the petty analogy immediately and draw superficial or false conclusions from it. They are mistaken, but that is of no importance. Even false, only the amount of information counts."

    Senicitas, (also known as Summer Forces or The Birth of Venus), was painted when Dalí was completing his military service. It is one of a series of paintings that mark the emergence of themes and symbols that were to dominate Dalí's work. It also shows Dalí producing a more definite Surrealist style, as does The Wounded Bird.
    Senicitas is Spanish for "little cinders", referring to the red marks that are attacking the limbless body. The body, though it is more male than female, has no genitals but to the right of it a hand forms the shape of male genitalia. There are also several headless female bodies; one covered in dark veins squeezes her lactating breast. Dalí uses various techniques of depiction here: some images are painted quite realistically, like the female body in the bottom middle of the painting, while others like the donkey above, appear as a scattered outline only.
    The decapitated head of Dalí's friend Lorca appears as if dead, lying on the ground underneath the body. One of their favorite games was for Lorca to pretend he was dead; he could do this quite convincingly for long periods of time.