Extraordinary artist Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domenech (1904–1989) was born on this day in the fishing village of Figureas, on the northeast coast of Spain.

"At the age of seven," he once confessed, "I wanted to be Napoleon, and my ambition has been growing ever since."

Imaginative and controversial, with wild eyes and handlebar moustache, he was known for eccentricity that Playboy in 1964 described as "living just this side of madness."

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad," said Dali, who once arrived at Paris' Sorbonne to give the speech "Vermeer and the Rhinoceros" in a white Rolls Royce filled with thousands of white cauliflowers.

The surrealism master allowed his paintings—what he called "hand-painted dream photographs"—to delve into the subconscious. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicted three melting watches in an eerily calm landscape.

Some consider the image a tribute to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which altered fixed notions of time and space. Dali, provocative and playful, confessed that overripe camembert cheese inspired the image.

"The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret," he said. "Every morning when I awake, the greatest joy is mine: that of being Salvador Dali."

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