First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, since 1934 the painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which received it from an anonymous donor.

As Dawn Adès wrote, "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order".

Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert melting in the sun.

[5] The year prior to painting the Persistence of Memory, Dali developed his "paranoiac-critical method," deliberately inducing psychotic hallucinations to inspire his art.

[6] It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" (with much texture near its face, and much contrast and tone in the picture) that Dalí used in several contemporary pieces to represent himself – the abstract form becoming something of a self-portrait, reappearing frequently in his work.