Salvador Dalí ,Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali (11 May 1904 - 23 January 1989) was a surrealist painter, one of the most popular artists of the 20th century. He was born and died in Figueres, a small town in the Catalan province of northern Spain, where he created his own museum in 1974, the Teatre-Museu Gala Salvador Dalí. From a very young age, he took up painting and drawing (at the age of seven, Salvador Dalí painted his first picture and wanted to be Napoleon); his early paintings were mainly oil paintings influenced by Impressionism. He then went to study at the Fine Arts School in Madrid (from 1921 to 1925) where he met Luis Buñuel and Federico Garcia Lorca. In 1928, in Paris, he met André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement, as well as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and especially the young Russian woman Gala (wife of the poet Paul Eluard), his future wife and muse. The appearance of the latter is a revelation for Dali. From then on, Gala will never separate from Dali. Gala then became the model, the muse and the inseparable companion of one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, whom she followed in all his wanderings, in Europe and the United States. Her favourite themes are death, psychoanalysis, women, battles, landscapes, religion, eroticism, putrefaction... staged with remarkable pictorial mastery and a tendency for trompe l'oeil images. In 1932 Dalí took part in the first Surrealist exhibition in the United States and achieved triumphant success. Salvador Dalí was also interested in many other arts and was particularly fascinated by cinema ("An Andalusian Dog" with Buñuel), photography, fashion or advertising (Lanvin's Chocolate). He was also passionate about science, especially Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which he represented in his own way in the famous "soft watches" in his painting Persistence of Memory. On 23 January 1989, Salvador Dalí died of a heart attack in Torre Galatea.