The Fair Captive, 1947 by Rene Magritte

The Fair Captive, 1947 by Rene Magritte
The Fair Captive, 1947 by Rene Magritte

This painting is the third version of The Fair Captive, differing from those of 1931 and 1935 which situated the easel in a landscape setting. It preceded by two years the series of works known by the title The Human Condition. In both series Magritte investigated the paradoxical relationship between a painted image and what it conceals. Magritte might have learned the painting within a painting from illustrations in A. Cassagne's Traité pratique de perspective (1873), a book used at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts when Magritte was a student there. It was a rich field for investigation, as suggested by the number of variations on the idea. He surely saw De Chiricho's 1917 version of a painting within a painting, Great Metaphysical Interior.

In this present work, the easel, flanked by a boulder and a flaming tuba, is moved to a beach. Since the flames of the burning tuba leave a reflection on the 'canvas', we are brought again to the notion of the canvas both as a pane of glass which allows the spectator to 'see through' reality, and as a metaphor for painting as a window on reality, as with Duchamp's Large Glass.