René Magritte

I've just discovered that, apart from Rousseau's Reveries Of The Solitary Walker (which inspired the name of this blog), there's also a picture by the surrealist painter René Magritte (1898-1967) with the same title. Les Reveries Du Promeneur Solitaire (1926) depicts a ghostly white body floating behind a bowler-hatted man who stands beside a river. It's clearly influenced by the nighttime suicide of his mother - she drowned herself in the Belgian Sambre River when Magritte was 14. It's likely that paintings such as this helped him exert some control over the trauma of his unfortunate experience.