Golconda _{(Rene Magritte, Surrealism)}

Golconda depicts a scene of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be drops of heavy rain (or to be floating like helium balloons, though there is no actual indication of motion), against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky. The men are spaced in hexagonal grids facing the viewpoint and receding back in grid layers.

Magritte himself lived in a similar suburban environment, and dressed in a similar fashion. The bowler hat was a common feature of much of his work, and appears in paintings like The Son of Man. As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, near Hyderabad, which from the mid-14th century until the end of the 17th was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a synonym for 'mine of wealth'."

Magritte's Other Works