Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte was a Surrealist painter who was born in Belgium in 1898. He sometimes painted objects in places were they didn’t usually belong, like in Time Transfixed in which a train is coming out of a fireplace. Other times, Magritte confused the foreground (the things at the front of the painting) with the background, like in The Large Family, The Seducer, and The Blank Signature. He wanted people to look at ordinary things in different ways.
He got married in 1922 and designed wallpaper and posters in order to make enough money to live. Magritte is well-known for including men in bowler hats in his paintings. He often wore a bowler hat himself and, though you usually can’t see the men’s faces, these paintings are commonly thought of as self-portraits.