Salvador Dali, Pastorale, 1981, art-etching-pastorale

The Surrealist Salvador Dalí illustrated several classic works of literature throughout his career, from Dante’s The Divine Comedy to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Of these projects, the book most closely linked to Dalí’s own cultural heritage is Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote De La Mancha, widely regarded as the most influential novel of the Spanish Golden Age. Dalí illustrated a 1946 edition of the novel, which he filled with 38 unique drawings of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s horseback adventures across Spain. Nearly two decades later, when Dalí received a commission to create a suite of prints inspired by the icons of Spanish culture, he turned again to this classic tale. The resulting suite, The Five Spanish Immortals, features Cervantes and Don Quixote as two of the immortals, alongside medieval hero El Cid and artists El Greco and Diego Velázquez.