Salvador Dalí (b. 1904, Figueres, Spain; d. 1989, Figueres, Spain) was a Spanish painter and one of the central figures of Surrealism. Working with the precision of an academic painter, he rendered dreams, obsessions and double images with photographic clarity, an approach he called his paranoiac critical method. The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its soft watches draped over a quiet coastal landscape, remains among the most widely recognized images of modern art. Beyond painting he produced sculpture, prints, jewelry and stage designs, and he worked in film, making Un Chien Andalou (1929) with Luis Buñuel and designing the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

Dalí studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid from 1922 until 1926 and joined the Surrealist group in Paris in 1929. He and his wife Gala lived in the United States from 1940 to 1948 before settling at Port Lligat on the Catalan coast. In 1974 he opened the Dalí Theatre Museum in Figueres, which he conceived as a work of art in its own right, and in 1982 the Salvador Dalí Museum opened in St. Petersburg, Florida, holding one of the largest collections of his work. The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid presented a major retrospective in 2012 and 2013. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou and the Reina Sofía.