Salvador Dalí painted this portrait of Anna Maria from the Casacuberta Marsans Collection when he was only twenty years old. It pays homage to his sister, his first muse, his favourite model and his closest confidante. Their relationship began to deteriorate in 1929, when the artist fell in love with Gala, the wife of Paul Éluard, and moved in with her. Their estrangement became definitive following the publication in 1949 of Salvador Dalí Seen Through the Eyes of His Sister, Anna Maria’s memoirs. Dalí accused her of writing “manifest falsehoods” and of having sold the portraits he had painted of her.

In this portrait, Anna Maria’s penetrating gaze is evidence of her strong character, which Dalí conveys with remarkable economy of means and purity of line. Her portrait is an important example of the realism characteristic of the artist’s early work, before his journey to Paris where he would start producing Surrealist compositions. His early language should be understood within the context of the avant-garde realism of the 1920s, a movement that represented true artistic modernity.