This exquisite gouache dates from Magritte’s most creative decade and the period in which he developed the motifs and themes that would underpin the rest of his career. The late 1930s were important years for the artist. His reputation was growing both in Europe and across the Atlantic, and with this came a series of exhibitions and important commissions. In 1936 he had his first one-man show in the United States, and that same year Alfred J. Barr included his work in the now-legendary Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He was similarly celebrated in his own country, and in 1939 an exhibition of his recent work was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. For the first t.mes , in addition to his oil paintings Magritte also exhibited a number of gouaches including La saveur des larmes. From this period onwards, gouaches would become a significant part of his œuvre, used both to repeat ideas and images and develop new motifs (fig. 1).

The central image of La saveur des larmes – a leaf-tree rising out of a vast landscape populated only by a lone house – was a motif that Magritte returned to throughout his career and is seen here in one of its earliest incarnations. It first appeared in an oil painting of 1935 (fig. 2) as the solution to one of Magritte’s ‘problems’. He discussed this particular problem in a letter to André Breton in 1934, ‘I am trying at the moment to discover what it is in a tree that belongs to it specifically but which would run counter to our concept of a tree’, finding the solution in ‘a large leaf the stem of which was a trunk directly planted in the ground’ (quoted in David Sylvester (ed.), René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 194).

There is a delicious subtlety in the combination of objects in the leaf-tree image because they are not only similar to each other, but of one another, creating an effect that is almost an optical illusion in the way it demands the viewer’s close attention. The present work is a particularly vivid and successfully wrought example of this motif; the medium of gouache allows Magritte a delicacy that is not found in oil paint and so the detailed trunk of the tree and its span of branches give particular strength to the concept. Magritte develops the theme further, with the leaf-tree being slowly eaten away by a series of beautifully rendered, larger-than-life caterpillars. The juxtapositions of scale – in particular with the small house in the background – amplify the uncanny nature of the composition. Executed in the months before the outbreak of war in Europe, the enigmatic title – the flavour of tears – and the clouded horizon may allude to the increasingly ominous political situation although some optimism remains in the luminous horizon and the glowing lights at the windows of the house. This early example of the illuminated house would later be transformed into the central concept of Magritte’s celebrated L’empire des lumières series (fig. 3), and there as in the present work it serves to highlight the absence of a human presence in the scene.

As in much of Magritte’s best work, in La saveur des larmes he combines this absence with a curious, almost watchful, agency – in this case, embodied through the ‘figure’ of the leaf-tree. As Jacques Meuris observed: ‘Nature, as Magritte saw it, was an element with the same characteristics, mutatis mutandis, as those with which he invested every object, every thing. There was no “naturalist” tendency in his work, no ecological impulse, not even a poetic transformation of the natural. Nevertheless, trees and leaves, alone or in groups, clad or bare, occasionally nibbled by insects, may be regarded as “individuals”, invested with multifarious feelings, endowed with charms in the various senses of the word’ (Jacques Meuris, René Magritte, London, 1988, p. 154). This effect imbues the present work with a true sense of the uncanny and as such makes it a powerful example of Magritte’s enigmatic Surrealist vision.