La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed)

This tall painting shows a quiet room with a very strange visitor. A fireplace is set into the wall, with a mantel, the shelf above it, and a clock sits on that shelf. A mirror hangs higher up. Out of the fireplace comes a small steam locomotive, as if it were rushing into the room. The painting is oil on canvas, about four feet ten inches high and three feet three inches wide. Its French title, La durée poignardée, speaks of time being stabbed through. Everything is painted in a calm, clear, realistic way.

Start with the smoke. Find the front of the locomotive in the middle of the painting, then follow the plume of smoke upward into the chimney opening above the fireplace. That path is the link between the two odd partners. Next, look at the clock on the mantel and at the mirror above it. Both belong to an ordinary home, and they make the train look even more out of place. Notice how calm and neat the room stays around the train.

René Magritte, a Belgian artist, painted this in 1938. At the time he was trying to draw out what he called poetic secrets through his pictures. He thought about both philosophy and psychology as he worked. His challenge to himself was to place two images together so that they would suggest a third thing in the viewer's mind, one that is not actually painted. Here he chose two very different objects: a train and a fireplace. The result became one of his best-known works.

A fireplace belongs to the home, and a train belongs to industry. They seem to have nothing in common, yet smoke connects them. Magritte understood that people looking at the locomotive's billowing exhaust would think of the smoke that travels up a chimney. That moment of connection is the painting's poetic secret, and it happens in your own mind rather than on the canvas. Look once more at the smoke where it reaches the chimney, and notice how quickly your eye makes the link.