René Magritte’s L’ami intime (The Intimate Friend), 1958

In The Man in the Bowler Hat, his history of the titular piece of headgear, Fred Miller Robinson called his subject ‘probably the most democratic of all hats’. Originating in England in the mid-19th century, the bowler was popular initially among horse-riders in the countryside, as protection against low-hanging tree branches. Before long, the hat caught on with urban dwellers, keen — in Robinson’s words — to avoid the ‘steady downpour of grit, smoke and soot’ in Victorian cities. By the time René Magritte was growing up, in the early years of the 20th century, it had become a standard item of clothing among European men, worn by those of all classes.

The bowler-hatted man would become one of the artist’s most famous and recurring motifs, adopted from the mid-1920s through to his death in 1967. And one of the finest of the few examples left in private hands of the bowler-hatted man seen close up from behind, L’ami intime (The Intimate Friend), appears in The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale at Christie’s in London on 7 March 2024 — an auction coinciding with the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto (which was penned by André Breton in 1924).

The picture features a man in a bowler hat, seen from behind, standing on a balcony, staring out over a sunlit landscape. A baguette and a glass of water appear behind his back, ostensibly levitating. One might say that L’ami intime offers a fusion of three artistic genres — figure, landscape and still life — with the Surrealist twist that the objects representing the still life seem to defy gravity.

Adding to the air of mystery is the way that Magritte rendered the spherical bowler, the crusty baguette and the crystal-clear wine glass with such hyperreal precision that each has an uncanny kind of presence.

Among the artist’s well-known early depictions of the bowler-hatted man is L’assassin menacé (The Menaced Assassin) from 1927, today part of MoMA’s collection in New York. Here, as in a few other works from this time, he took inspiration from a popular set of novels and films revolving around a master criminal called Fantômas. In L’assassin menacé, two detectives in bowler hats arrive at a murder scene, in a composition based on a still from the third Fantômas film, Le mort qui tue.

Bowlers would largely disappear from Magritte’s work in the 1930s and 1940s, only to proliferate again from the start of the 1950s onwards. The slightly sinister atmosphere of old was now replaced by scenes in which the hatted male is a benign, almost calming figure. It is this evolved type of man in a bowler for which Magritte is renowned.

The artist referred to him as ‘Mr Everybody’, adding that ‘the bowler poses no surprise. It is a headgear lacking originality. The man in the bowler simply constitutes… anonymity.’ The fact that Magritte often depicted such a man with his back to us — as he did in L’ami intime — adds to the mysterious sense of this figure not as an individual but as the epitome of faceless uniformity.

As someone who lived a bourgeois life in a Brussels suburb — happily married to his wife Georgette for 45 years until his death — Magritte thought of himself as pretty anonymous. Occasionally, he even posed for photographs in a bowler of his own. One should be wary of seeing his paintings of men in hats as self-portraits, however. He was too knowing an artist for that.

The early-to-mid-1950s saw Magritte produce a run of major works with bowler-hatted subjects, including the painting coming to auction and two similar canvases: Le bouquet tout fait (today found in Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka) and La boîte de Pandore (in the collection of Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven). Those two pictures show a man with his back to the viewer, but differ from L’ami intime in having slightly fantastic elements hovering behind or beside him: the golden-haired figure of Flora from Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera in the former, and a giant white rose in the latter.

What’s notable about L’ami intime is the way Magritte achieves pictorial impact through the use solely of quotidian components (baguette, glass and bowler hat). The Belgian is perhaps best remembered by art history for his portrayals of ordinary things in extraordinary settings or combinations — and L’ami intime is a supreme example.

Appearing at auction for the first time in more than 40 years, L’ami intime comes from the esteemed Surrealist collection of Gilbert and Lena Kaplan. It was last exhibited in 1998, at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, in a retrospective of Magritte’s work.

Gilbert Kaplan founded the successful finance magazine Institutional Investor in his twenties, and in later life went on to become a highly respected scholar and conductor of the music of Mahler. He and his wife Lena were also keen admirers and collectors of the art of Magritte — and in 1982, that admiration manifested itself in a catalogue raisonné of the Belgian’s graphic oeuvre, which Gilbert published and co-authored with Timothy Baum.

It’s worth noting that when it came to names for his paintings, the artist often turned to poet friends of his to think one up after a picture was finished. In many cases, such as L’ami intime, there is little obvious connection between image and title.

This complemented Magritte’s modus operandi. He wasn’t an artist seeking to reproduce our experience of the world; he was an artist seeking to subvert our experience of the world — that is, to make us think again about it, and consider how we fit in.

‘Everything we see hides another thing,’ he once said. ‘We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it’s impossible.’

The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale takes place alongside the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 7 March 2024, part of Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions from 27 February to 21 March. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales here