La duración apuñalada

Magritte painted this in 1938 for Edward James, a wealthy English poet who was one of the Surrealists' great patrons. Its real title is French, La durée poignardée, roughly ongoing time stabbed through, and Magritte wanted it hung at the foot of James's staircase so the little locomotive would seem to charge at guests as they came down. James placed it over a fireplace instead, which quietly annoyed the painter, though the picture already shows a train steaming out of a mantelpiece into an empty room. Magritte spent these years chasing what he called poetic secrets, setting two ordinary things side by side until a third, stranger idea rose in the mind. In the mirror above the mantel only the clock and the two candlesticks are reflected, and the train throws back nothing at all.