In his later life, Magritte often worked with the strange similarities between objects. This marked a change from the more common Surrealist method of placing dissimilar objects side by side. For this painting Magritte prepared drawings in order to find the best combination of subject matter. Only when the drawing was successful, did he turn to paint and canvas.
What he sought in these drawings was a sense of paradox. He asked like the philosopher Hegel, why every object exists as an idea in relation to some other object. Without rain, there would be no umbrella, without the sea there would be no ships. In this painting it would seem that the foot calls forth the idea of the shoe. Yet, in allowing the two images to penetrate each other, we can never be sure whether the foot calls upon the pure idea of the shoe, or the shoe calls upon the memory of the absent foot. Magritte makes his exploration of the unity of thought a humble and sometimes playful one. In this case, the shoes are working-man's foot wear, and recall the sad and expressive shoes painted by Van Gogh. Around this time, Dali was making a big impact on Surrealism with work such as the Burning Giraffe.
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