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Dalí was born in Figueres, a small town outside Barcelona, to a prosperous family. Throughout his life, Dali retained his love for Catalan culture, and he depicted the landscape surrounding Figueres in several key paintings throughout his career. Upon recognizing his immense talent in art in 1916, Salvador Dalí's parents sent him to drawing school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, Spain.

Dalí later entered Academia de San Fernando in Madrid and experimented with various styles. Freudian theory underpins Dali's attempts at forging a formal and visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now ubiquitous images through which Dali achieved tremendous fame during his lifetime and beyond.

Meeting Gala was the most important event in the artist's life and decisive for his future career. When he met her, she was married to Paul Eluard. She became his companion, his muse, his sexual partner, his model in numerous art works and his business manager.

Dali's manner of revealing the gap between reality and illusion influenced all manner of modern artists. Beyond developing his own symbolic language, Dali elaborated a way to represent the inner mind. Dalí’s personal style was evolved from a combination of influences. The three greatest influences in Dalí’s life, Faith, Homeland and Romance, evolved into the three biggest theme, dreams and imagination, sexual obsession, and female, in his works. Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas. He is undoubtedly one of the major Surrealists who used shock and unease to illustrate moments of pleasure, and in this his work remains highly contemporary.