René Magritte: Life, Famous Paintings and the Meaning of His Surrealism

René Magritte (1898–1967) painted ordinary things so precisely that they became impossible: a pipe that is not a pipe, a man whose face is hidden by an apple, a night street under a daylight sky. The Belgian painter dressed like a bank clerk and worked for years at an easel set up in his dining room, yet his pictures became some of the most recognisable images of the 20th century.

This guide covers his life, his most famous paintings and what they mean, where to see the originals, and quick answers to the questions people ask most.

René Magritte at a glance

• Born: 21 November 1898 in Lessines, Belgium
• Died: 15 August 1967 in Brussels (Schaerbeek), aged 68
• Movement: surrealism, as the leading figure of the Belgian surrealist group
• Wife: Georgette Berger, married in 1922; the couple had no children
• Famous works: The Lovers (1928), The Treachery of Images (1929), Time Transfixed (1938), The Empire of Light (1949–1964), Golconda (1953), The Son of Man (1964)
• Where to see his work: the Magritte Museum in Brussels, the René Magritte Museum in Jette, LACMA, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Menil Collection

From Lessines to Brussels: the early years

Magritte was born in Lessines, in the Belgian province of Hainaut, and grew up around Charleroi. In 1912, when he was 13, his mother Régina drowned herself in the river Sambre. Biographers often link the veiled faces of his later paintings to that loss, a reading Magritte himself always rejected.

He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1918 and tried Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism without finding his own voice. He met Georgette Berger at a fair in Charleroi in 1913, ran into her again in a Brussels botanical garden in 1920 and married her two years later. To earn a living, he designed wallpaper and drew advertisements: a training in clear, efficient images that shaped everything he painted afterwards.

How Magritte became a surrealist

The turning point came around 1923, when the poet Marcel Lecomte showed him a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s The Song of Love. Magritte later said it moved him to tears: here was a painting that set familiar objects side by side to create mystery. In 1926 he painted The Lost Jockey, which he considered his first truly surrealist picture. His first solo exhibition, at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels in 1927, was poorly received.

That same year he moved to Le Perreux-sur-Marne, near Paris, and joined André Breton’s surrealist circle. In 1929 he published "Words and Images" in the review La Révolution surréaliste, a short illustrated manifesto on the gap between objects, their names and their pictures. The Paris years ended after a quarrel with Breton, who objected to the cross Georgette wore around her neck. In 1930 the couple returned to Brussels for good.

Advertising, Jette and the easel in the dining room

Back in Brussels, Magritte and his brother Paul opened Studio Dongo, a small agency producing posters and advertisements. From 1930 to 1954 the couple lived in a modest house on Rue Esseghem in Jette, where Magritte painted in the dining room. The house is now the René Magritte Museum. This is where he perfected his method: no visible brushstrokes, smooth colours, everyday objects painted with the clarity of a commercial illustration, then placed in impossible situations.

Magritte’s most famous paintings and what they mean

The Treachery of Images (1929)

A realistic pipe floats above the handwritten caption "Ceci n’est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). The point is simple: it is a picture of a pipe, and you cannot fill it with tobacco. The painting became a manifesto on the difference between an image and reality, and the philosopher Michel Foucault devoted an essay to it, This Is Not a Pipe, in 1968. The original belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Lovers (1928)

Two lovers kiss with their heads wrapped in white cloth, close to each other yet unable to see or touch. It belongs to a group of paintings from 1928 with veiled faces; one version is in the collection of MoMA in New York.

Time Transfixed (1938)

A small steam locomotive bursts out of a fireplace, beneath a clock and an empty mirror. The French title, La Durée poignardée, literally means "duration stabbed". The painting hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Empire of Light (1949–1964)

A street at night, lit by a single lamp, under a bright blue daytime sky. Magritte returned to this paradox again and again, in a long series of oils and gouaches. Versions hang at MoMA, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. In 2022 one of them sold at Christie’s in New York for $79.7 million, a record for the artist.

Golconda (1953)

Dozens of identical men in overcoats and bowler hats hang in the air above a row of houses, as if falling like rain or floating in place. The title, suggested by his friend the poet Louis Scutenaire, refers to Golconda, an Indian city once famous for its diamonds. The painting belongs to the Menil Collection in Houston.

The Son of Man (1964)

A man in a dark coat and bowler hat stands in front of a low wall and a cloudy sea, his face hidden by a floating green apple. Magritte painted it as a self-portrait and explained: "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see." It is in a private collection and remains his most parodied image.

Sunlit surrealism and the "vache" period

During the German occupation of Belgium, Magritte answered the gloom with bright, Renoir-like colours, a phase he called "sunlit surrealism" (roughly 1943–1947). Breton and the Paris surrealists disliked it. In 1948, for his first solo show in Paris, at the Galerie du Faubourg, he painted in a few weeks a series of deliberately crude, garish pictures: the "vache" (cow) period, a provocation aimed at Parisian taste. Nothing sold, and he went back to the smooth, precise style that brought him international fame in the 1950s and 1960s.

Why the bowler hat, the apple and the pipe?

Magritte worked with a small vocabulary of objects: bowler hats, apples, pipes, clouds, birds, curtains, bells and keys. The bowler hat was the uniform of the anonymous middle-class man, and he wore one himself. He disliked symbolic readings of his work and wrote that his painting consists of "visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery". The strangeness never comes from distorted forms, as in Dalí’s melting clocks, but from familiar things placed at the wrong scale, in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

Magritte’s legacy

A retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 confirmed his fame in the United States. His idea that an image can question itself fed pop art and conceptual art, and his motifs are everywhere in advertising, album covers and cinema: the bowler hats of the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair are a direct homage. In 2009, Brussels opened a museum devoted entirely to him.

Where to see René Magritte’s paintings

• Magritte Museum, Brussels: part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, it holds the world’s largest Magritte collection.
• René Magritte Museum, Jette (Brussels): the house where he lived and painted from 1930 to 1954.
• LACMA, Los Angeles: The Treachery of Images.
• MoMA, New York: The Lovers, The False Mirror and a version of The Empire of Light.
• Art Institute of Chicago: Time Transfixed.
• Menil Collection, Houston: Golconda.

Living with Magritte’s spirit: our tribute posters

Magritte died in 1967, so his paintings remain protected by copyright in Europe until the end of 2037. That is why we do not sell reproductions of his work. Instead, our studio drew a collection of tribute posters inspired by Magritte: original designs that borrow his clear skies, birds, suns and floating objects without copying a single canvas.

Spark of Life sets a red cherry against a cloudy sky, The Pigeon and the Cherry pairs a white bird with the same fruit, and Men of Light plays with silhouettes and a glowing sun. Hummingbird and Glass Cloche traps a bird under glass, like one of Magritte’s riddles. Their flat colours and generous empty space make them easy to hang in a living room or above a desk.

Frequently asked questions about René Magritte

What is René Magritte’s most famous painting?

The Treachery of Images (1929), with its pipe and the words "Ceci n’est pas une pipe", and The Son of Man (1964), the man with a green apple in front of his face, are his best-known images.

What does "This is not a pipe" mean?

That a painting of a pipe is not a pipe: it is an image, made of paint, that only represents the object. Magritte uses a simple joke to show that words, images and things are never the same.

Did René Magritte have children?

No. René and Georgette Magritte had no children. Georgette outlived him by almost twenty years and died in 1986.

Was Magritte French?

No, he was Belgian. He lived near Paris from 1927 to 1930 and took part in the French surrealist group, but spent almost his entire life in Belgium, mostly in Brussels.

Where is the Magritte Museum?

In Brussels, on the Place Royale, within the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. A second museum, the René Magritte Museum, occupies his former house in Jette.