The common supposition that any bowler-hatted man painted by Magritte is something of a portrait of the artist gets things the wrong way round. Magritte painted numerous bowler-hatted men – most of them in his last twenty years-without giving one of them features unmistakably his own-this in spite of the fact that several paintings of his demonstrate that he had no inhibitions about clearly portraying his own face when he wanted to. But as Magritte's figure of the bowler-hatted man increased in fame, a tendency arose for photographers to per-suade the artist to pose as a bowler-hatted man, privately his hat was usually a trilby, and it is, of course, the case that nowadays our image of an artist is usually based on what magazine photographs have made of him. [Sotheby’s, New York - Gouache on paper, 33 x 24.8 cm]