Rene Magritte, a master of fantastic art, was born in Lessines, Belgium in 1898, and despite the age in which he lived - the growth of mass media and mass communication - preferred to live his life in a small suburb of Brussels, painting what he liked to pain and caring little for the theories of his Surrealist contemporaries. The forth paintings illustrated in this book need no words - what Magritte did more than anything else was to p aint meticulously familliar, even personal objects, in unfamiliar, even startling settings - out of context at first sight in both time and place. If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder then so too does understanding - in the interpretation of Magritte's work the eye, the mind and the heart all compete without a fixed formula or equation but with equal claims.