Which artist painted The Persistence of Memory, with melting clocks?

Dalí, in 1931, and the painting is small - about 24 by 33 centimetres, which surprises everyone who meets it after seeing it reproduced at poster size. He said the soft watches came from watching Camembert melt in the sun.

The formless creature in the middle of the composition, with the long eyelashes, is a distorted self-portrait - the same profile appears across his work. The landscape behind is the coast of Catalonia near his home at Portlligat, painted precisely from life, which is his standard method: hallucinatory objects rendered with academic realism in a real place.

He was thrown out of the Surrealist group in 1934, partly over politics and his refusal to condemn Franco, and Breton anagrammed his name into Avida Dollars - eager for dollars. Dalí replied that he himself was surrealism, and spent the rest of his career as a commercial phenomenon, designing shop windows and a lollipop logo and appearing on American game shows. Whether that was a betrayal of the movement or the logical conclusion of it is an argument that has never quite finished.