Tote bag Magritte

Perhaps the most well-known artwork of Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, The Son of Man is in fact a self-portrait. The man standing in an overcoat and a bowler hat is Magritte himself, but his face is largely obscured by a hovering green apple. However, the man’s eyes are visible, discreetly peeking over the edge of the apple.

René Magritte (born November 21, 1898, Lessines, Belgium—died August 15, 1967, Brussels) was a Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the apple, the castle, the rock, the window, and other ordinary objects, which were often set in unusual or unsettling situations.