On a deserted sandy beach, lit by a pure, bright Northern sky, there sits a monumental stone apple, made of the same stone as the rocks that dominate the shoreline. With little ground beneath its base and little sky above its leaves, tightly cropped at the top and the bottom of the canvas, it is Magritte’s most majestic apple since La Chambre d’écoute (1953). Is it a portrait of a perfectly proportioned apple with a skin of stone, a surrealist representation of a subject with neither face nor profile, the portrait of an enigma? Or a still life, reinventing the rules of the genre—in the open air, carved into the rock, as if the scene is taking place at the moment when the vegetable kingdom first gloriously appeared on the earth. A still life, certainly, that has been there forever but will not be there much longer.

Lastly, it is a landscape, with its masses, its flowing lines, its magical luminosity—a Northern sky at the seaside. It is La Grande Table by René Magritte, one of the painter’s most beautiful creations from the time when he was moving into the final period of his œuvre.

La Grande Table is one of a series of petrified canvases that Magritte painted from the 1950s onward, which constitutes one of the richest and most fascinating periods of his post-war career. Always seeking greater conciseness and efficiency in order to create more mystery and familiarise the viewer with the collusion of visible objects and invisible dreams, in the theme of petrification Magritte found a way of representing a world whose objects seem devoid of life at the surface but who are nevertheless bursting with form, freshness, and rediscovered youth.

The physicist Albert V. Baez credited Magritte with discovering the beauty of gravitational force, by making it first tangible, then sensual, in works such as La Grande Table. Others, such as Magritte himself, preferred a metaphysical interpretation of this new Stone Age: “I know of no work that conveys to such an extent the sensation of a suspended universe, a universe in which everything lies in wait and nothing moves” (Roger Shattuck, Ceci n’est pas Magritte, Art Forum, September 1966, p. 35).

Thus, from the dolmen-letters (L’Art de la conversation, 1950) or the gigantic granite chairs (La Légende des siècles, 1950) right up until the Château des Pyrénées (1959), via the celebrated Journal intime (1955) housed at MoMA, as Magritte journeyed through the 1950s he turned everything he painted to stone. The first mineral depiction of an apple, that quintessential Magritte object, appeared in Souvenir de voyage (1950, cat 735) in a composition similar to La Grande Table, but without the sea and under a leaden sky. It reappears in a series of paintings entitled La Parole donnée (1950, cat 747, 748).

Then the petrified apple disappears from Magritte’s vocabulary for most of the 1960s: the beach remains his preferred backdrop for the fruit but from now on Magritte’s apples have green skin and wear a mask—this is the time of the Prêtre marié and La Valse hésitation, titled according to whether it is day or night.

If La Grande Table represents Magritte’s final return to an image that he would not revisit for a decade, it also heralds the dawn of the Prêtre marié cycle whose innumerable variations (both oils and gouaches) constitute an inexhaustible repertoire with infinite nuances of sky and light around the two ubiquitous masked fruit. Magritte allows the masks to slip to show that the enigma of his composition is not its only source of beauty: even without his partner and without the famous mask, the Prêtre marié nevertheless attains a state of grace.

In La Grande Table, the delicate harmonious blue, grey, pink, and gold of the palette, the clarity with which the rocky chaos is dispersed across the landscape, the magnifying effect of a luminosity so pure that we almost believe we can see the air touch the surface of the stone and mix with that of the sea, all point to the joy of a painter at the peak of his talents. La Grande Table is also one of René Magritte’s most radiant works because it marks the zenith of one of the most striking series by a painter whose incantatory repetition of subject matter echoes the greatest modern series painter: Claude Monet.

It is thus no coincidence that it is in the passionate texts that Clémenceau wrote for the first exhibition of Monet’s Cathedrals that we find the finest compliment we could bestow on the magnificent La Grande Table: “The stone is hard and resistant under the weight of centuries. The mass holds up well, solid in the blur of the mist, tenderised beneath the changing skies, bursting into powdery stone flowers in the embrace of the sun. Vibrant stone blossom bathed in the light of life, responding to the celestial kiss with joyful, cloudy spirals, highlighting all of life’s sensuality with the caress of golden sunlight on dust” (Révolutions de Cathédrales, La Justice, Monday 20th May 1895).