Belgium Banknotes 500 Belgian Francs banknote 1998 Rene Magritte
National Bank of Belgium - Nationale Bank van België - Banque nationale de Belgique
Obverse: Portrait of Belgian surrealist artist René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967). The artist’s portrait accompanied by a man with a bowler hat as his shadow. His right shoulder bears Magritte’s signature. A number of paintings are evoked on the note, like The natural graces with the foliage that changes into birds in the centre of the note. Two outlines of pipes refer to the famous The treachery of images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) whereas the half-open door evokes The Victory. A tree in the form of a veined leaf is the main element of The search of the absolute. Finally, the key inserted in the keyhole is a reminder of The devil’s smile. This print in register is also partly visible on the reverse.
Reverse: Parts of stylized pieces of Magritte's unexplained surrealist art featuring a rain of men wearing bowler hats from his oil painting "Golconde", whereas the chair with a lion’s tail is taken from A simple love story. In the background the houses in staggered rows are taken from the canvas The mind’s gaze (Le regard mental). The night illuminated by a quarter of the moon in an outline of a person wearing a bowler hat refers to Man and Night (L’Homme et la Nuit) whereas the masked apple is taken from The married priest. The right border with the curtain from La Peine Perdue on the right border ends, just like in theatre, the spectacle.
Watermark: Effigy of René Magritte and his personal signature below it.
Work by: Monique Golaire (front); Monique Golaire and Nathalie Paquot (back) (Inv. - Sketch authors, designers); Patricia Vouez (Sculp. - Engraver).
Main colours: Turquoise, violet, green and yellow.
Signatures: Serge Bertholomé (De Schatbewaarder - Le Tresorier - Der Schatzmeister); Alfons "Fons" Verplaetse (De Gouverneur - Le Gouverneur - Der Gouverneur).
Date of issue: 16 April 1998.
Dimensions: 149 x 76 mm
Texts: Nationale Bank van Belgie. Vijfhonderd Frank. Banque Nationale de Belgique. Cinq Cents Francs.
Belgische Nationalbank. Fünfhundert Franken. National Bank of Belgium. Five Hundred Francs.
Belgian banknotes - Belgium paper money
1994-2001 Issue
René-François-Ghislain Magritte
René Magritte, in full René-François-Ghislain Magritte (born Nov. 21, 1898, Lessines, Belgium — died Aug. 15, 1967, Brussels), Belgian artist, one of the most prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. His works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others.
After studying at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts (1916–1918), Magritte became a designer for a wallpaper factory and then did sketches for advertisements. In 1922 he saw a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Song of Love (1914), an evocative and haunting juxtaposition of odd elements (a classical bust and a rubber glove among them) in a dreamlike architectural space; it had a great influence on Magritte’s mature style. For the next few years he was active in the Belgian Surrealist movement. With the support of a Brussels art gallery, he became a full-time painter in 1926.
His first solo show was held in 1927. It was not well received by the art critics of the day. That same year he and his wife moved to a suburb of Paris. There he met and befriended several of the Paris Surrealists, including poets André Breton and Paul Éluard, and he became familiar with the collages of Max Ernst. In 1930 Magritte returned to Brussels, where (except for the occasional journey) he remained for the rest of his life. During the 1940s he experimented with a variety of styles, sometimes, for example, incorporating elements of impressionism, but the paintings he produced in this period were not successful by most accounts, and he eventually abandoned the experimental. For the rest of his life he continued to produce his enigmatic and illogical images in a readily identifiable style. In his last year he supervised the construction of eight bronze sculptures derived from images in his paintings.
The sea and wide skies, which were enthusiasms of his childhood, figure strongly in his paintings. In Threatening Weather (1928) the clouds have the shapes of a torso, a tuba, and a chair. In The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959) a huge stone topped by a small castle floats above the sea. Other representative fancies were a fish with human legs, a man with a bird cage for a torso, and a gentleman leaning over a wall beside his pet lion. Dislocations of space, time, and scale were common elements. In Time Transfixed (1939), for example, a steaming locomotive is suspended from the centre of a mantelpiece in a middle-class sitting room, looking as if it had just emerged from a tunnel. In Golconda (1953) bourgeois, bowler-hatted men fall like rain toward a street lined with houses.
Two museums in Brussels celebrate Magritte: the René Magritte Museum, largely a biographical museum, is located in the house occupied by the artist and his wife between 1930 and 1954; and a new Magritte Museum, featuring some 250 of the artist’s works, opened in 2009 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.