There’s no one I love more than Dali when it comes to artists whose melting objects never figured out where the freezer was.

But there's something about his strange dreamscapes that make me want to summon Freud back to life and ask him, “Analyze this, Sig.”

Such is the case with this portrait of a young heiress named Dorothy Spreckels. While some elements are kind of self-explanatory (like, duh, this is a portrait of Dorothy Spreckels), there’s some stuff that requires further clarification. Like, what’s with the ocean Olympics in the background? There’s a badly constructed human pyramid of naked babies and two horses in the background, which makes no sense. Wait, if you look really close, there’s also an old guy holding up a portrait of a chick, which could possibly mean…nope, I don’t get it.

But let’s get to the foreground of the picture that does make some sense. Dorothy Spreckels was known as the “sugar princess” due to her family’s millions milked from their sugar business. And a clipping from the Milwaukee Sentinel tells us that she was “as pretty as a lump of the sweet herself." Darn tootin’. Dali probably thought so too because he paints her like the goddess Venus in her posture and in her placement on the back of a very weird dolphin. The dolphin represents something very important though: Spreckel’s estate, which was called La Dolphine. This is kind of an essential detail, because Dorothy’s second husband had just flown the coop and gone over to his mom-in-laws to wait out their separation. Can’t think of a lot of guys who would go to their mother-in-laws…that’s just lame, dude. Which is why Dorothy is shown firmly seated on a dolphin aka La ,Dolphine because this girl is the queen of her castle, and stayed put in her home. According to Dali, “She reminds me of classic paintings in which sea monsters are incidentally depicted. Besides, she tells me she loves the sea.” OK, Dali.

This was also the first full-length portrait that Dali ever painted. Worked out well for Dorothy, who loved the painting so much that she couldn’t hide it from the world within the walls of La Dolphine and gave it to the Legion of Honor so it could be beheld by the publics’ eye. Thanks for sharing!