This early oil is one of the portraits that Dalí made of his father, Don Salvador Dalí Cusi, a notary in Figueres and a very strong personality. In the background, we see the house in Cadaqués, where the family spent its holidays and which impressed the young Dalí with such happy memories. He associated Cadaqués with summer and painting, as he often notes in the diaries of his teens, Un diari: 1919–20. Les mevesimpressions i records íntims.
The dominant influence in this oil is clearly Impressionist, but we should not overlook its important symbolic-allegorical content. Above and beyond the technical mastery of the young artist, we see two elements that were decisive in the artist’s life simultaneously represented: the placid serenity of house and home reflected in the sea—an icon of the idyllic happiness of the summers in Cadaqués, and the omnipresent figure of Dalí’s father smoking his pipe.
