It was in Paris in 1923 that the Belgian artist René Magritte came into contact with André Breton and the future Surrealists, with whom he shared a taste for the subversive and the imaginary. Le Modèle rouge is executed in a painstakingly realistic style evident in the rendering of the wood, the pebbles and the veins of the feet. Yet this bizarre pair of shoe-feet belongs to an invented reality of dream or even nightmare. The title itself disorients in not seeming to correspond to the painting, Magritte as ever questioning the relation between language, image and reality.