Author
René Magritte
Movement / period
Surrealism
Technique
oil on canvas
Where it is
Private collection
Magritte said the apple hides the face, and the viewer always wants to see the hidden — that is the whole subject.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- It is a self-portrait: the man in the bowler hat is Magritte himself, though we never see the face.
- Magritte said the apple hides the face, and the viewer always wants to see the hidden — that is the whole subject.
- Look closely: the man's left arm bends the wrong way at the elbow — a deliberate 'error'.
- The bowler and apple have become meme-symbols, quoted in film, advertising and music videos.
- The painting is in a private collection and is rarely exhibited — the public knows it mostly from reproductions.
Estimated value
What it is worth today
The Son of Man is in a private collection and rarely shown; Magritte's works have reached $79 million at auction.
More details How a friend's request for a portrait cornered Magritte, why he hid his own face behind an apple, and how that obstruction became one of the twentieth century's most recognisable images.
It began with an awkward request
Harry Torczyner commissioned a portrait and Magritte called it a problem of conscience
New York lawyer, collector, and close friend Harry Torczyner proposed the commission in a letter of 28 June 1963. He wanted a portrait of Magritte, but not the conventional image of an artist at work.
Magritte replied that he had placed himself in paintings before without setting out to make a self-portrait. He could not promise a solution: inspiration would have to arrive on its own. The future icon began as an admission that the painter did not know how to show himself.
The answer arrived almost by accident
A gouache not intended as a self-portrait supplied the formula
In spring 1964 Magritte made the gouache The Taste of the Invisible: a bowler-hatted man stands by a low wall while a green apple covers his face. Only afterwards did he recognise that this combination answered Torczyner's request.
The canvas was finished by late July and safely reached New York in August. Torczyner received not a likeness but a paradoxical portrait: clothes and bearing evoke Magritte while the feature expected to establish identity, the face, is deliberately withheld.
The bowler was camouflage, not eccentricity
Magritte chose the uniform of a man who did not wish to stand out
He wore bowler hats himself and valued their lack of originality. Rather than perform the role of a flamboyant Surrealist in public, he dressed with almost emphatic bourgeois sobriety.
That ordinariness becomes unsettling here. The proper gentleman, sea, wall, and cloudy sky are individually plausible; only their relationship is impossible. The unsupported apple turns a familiar costume into an anonymous shell.
The apple reveals by preventing sight
The picture stages a contest between curiosity and refusal
Magritte described an endless tension between the apparent visible and the hidden visible: everything we see conceals something else. The apple is perfectly legible, yet makes the face inaccessible. A single eye peeks around its edge, just enough to intensify the wish to look behind it.
The apple and title invite biblical associations, but Magritte rejected a compulsory theological reading. The title was suggested by Irène Hamoir, wife of his friend Louis Scutenaire. Its strength lies in deepening the mystery rather than solving it.
A rare self-portrait became a universal mask
A private painting travelled through exhibitions, cinema, and popular memory
The Son of Man is one of only a handful of Magritte self-portraits. He liked the solution enough to reenact it in staged photographs during the mid-1960s. The painting was shown at Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum while remaining privately owned.
The image later became central to the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair and inspired innumerable quotations. It is easy to parody but difficult to exhaust: remove the face and the man can be artist, owner, or any viewer trying to see what has been denied.
Official sources
Where to check
- Official institution page René Magritte archive
- The Son of Man: commission, letters and catalogue historyChristie's
- Magritte's recurring objects and visual methodChristie's
- Magritte: The Mystery of the OrdinaryMuseum of Modern Art
- René Magritte: works, motifs and afterlifeSotheby's
Visual context
