Some Tuesday tranquility from the master of surreal scenarios, René Magritte. While this particular work, The Banquet—of which this is “the last, largest, and most impressive of four oil paintings of this title”, to quote The Art Institute of Chicago—is void of the floating top hats and anthropomorphic details that Magritte was so fond of, it is still distinctly dreamlike. In particular, it bears witness to the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the visible and invisible: the tangerine sun that should be obscured by the cluster of trees, instead burns bright before it, to strange and spellbinding effect.
