The Man Who Painted His Own Vanishing
Commissioned to paint a proud self-portrait in the style of the Belgian masters, René Magritte instead hid his own face forever — and gave the world one of its most haunting images.
In the summer of 1963, the lawyer and art collector Harry Torczyner made a simple request of his friend René Magritte. Torczyner wanted a self-portrait, something in the grand tradition of Belgian painters like Rubens and Ensor, and he knew Magritte was rarely seen in public without his signature bowler hat. It seemed a fitting commission for a man who had spent decades painting the world askew.
But Magritte found painting his own likeness unexpectedly difficult. Rather than confronting his own face directly, he conjured a stand-in: a man in an overcoat and bowler hat, standing before a low wall with the sea and a cloudy sky stretching behind him. The figure could be anyone. And crucially, no one would ever see his face — because a large green apple hovers in the air, suspended exactly where his features should be.
Look closely, though, and the painting resists its own concealment. The man's eyes peek out faintly from behind the curve of the apple, hinting at a presence that refuses to fully disappear. His left arm bends backward at the elbow in a way that shouldn't be possible, a small, unsettling wrongness tucked into an otherwise composed scene. Magritte finished the work in 1964 and titled it The Son of Man.
Magritte himself explained the logic of the apple with characteristic precision. He said it hides the face partly, so that you have the apparent face — the apple — hiding the visible but hidden face of the person underneath. Everything we see, he argued, hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. That tension between the visible and the concealed became, for him, an almost physical sensation, a kind of conflict between what is shown and what is withheld.
The Son of Man was not a singular idea. That same year Magritte painted The Great War, a close variation showing only the figure from the torso up, and a gouache version called A Taste of the Invisible. He also painted The Great War on Facades, in which a woman holding an umbrella stands before the same low wall and sea, her face covered by flowers instead of fruit, and Man in the Bowler Hat, where a white bird obscures the face rather than an apple. The bowler-hatted everyman and the hidden face were themes Magritte returned to again and again.
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