The Burning Giraffe

Salvador Dali's painting, The Burning Giraffe, epitomises the surrealist style of painting he was renowned for.

The emergence of psychoanalysis and the work of Sigmund Freud were major influences on the artist, along with the cubist output of Picasso and the work of other surrealists, such as, Miro and classical painters,including Vermeer and Velazquez.

Those coming to Dali for the first time, most typically through the coloured plates in art books, are often surprised to find that the actual canvases and boards he committed his work to are much smaller than imagined. The Burning Giraffe is one such example.

The work dates from 1937 when Dali was 34 years old. It was painted in Spain, with o...