Portrait De Lucia. Analysis: This Is One Of The First Portraits Dalí Painted. Editorial Photo

This is one of the first portraits Dalí painted. It depicts his nurse, Lucia Moncanut, as an old woman. Hired by Dalí’s family to look after him and his sister, Ana-Maria, in Figueras, she occupies an important place in the Dalínian iconography. When this picture was painted, the children having grown up, Lucia was taking care of their maternal grandmother, Ana Dalí remembers having worked at the same time on a portrait of Ana, in profile, holding in her hand a similar dahlia or perhaps a carnation – Dalí can’t remember which – like the Moorish carnations that Spanish women were in the habit of placing behind their ears or sticking in their hair. Dalí thinks that he painted Lucia’s portrait while he had tonsilitis and she was hovering around him as she used to do when he was a child in order to tell him stories.