Tanguy was the son of a retired navy captain, and was born January 5, 1900,[1] at the Ministry of Naval Affairs on Place de la Concorde in Paris, France.

He stumbled upon a painting by Giorgio de Chirico and was so deeply impressed he resolved to become a painter himself in spite of his complete lack of formal training.

Tanguy quickly began to develop his own unique painting style, giving his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1927, and marrying his first wife Jeannette Ducrocq (b.

She purchased his pictures Toilette de L'Air and The Sun in Its Jewel Case (Le Soleil dans son écrin)[7] for her collection.

With the outbreak of World War II, Sage moved back to her native New York, and Tanguy, judged unfit for military service, followed her.

Typically, these alien landscapes are populated with various abstract shapes, sometimes angular and sharp as shards of glass, sometimes with an intriguingly organic look to them, like giant amoebae suddenly turned to stone.

Brodskaïa writes that the painting reflects his debt to Giorgio de Chirico – falling shadows and a classical torso – and conjures up a sense of doom: the horizon, the emptiness of the plain, the solitary plant, the smoke, the helplessness of the small figures.

Jennifer Mundy, however, discovered that the title of this painting and several others were taken from a book about paranormal phenomena, Traité de metaphysique (1922) by Dr Charles Richet.

[15] Later, Tanguy's paintings (and, less directly, those of de Chirico) influenced the style of the 1980 French animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau, by Paul Grimault and Prévert.