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 a 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 a speech in a white Rolls Royce filled with thousands of white cauliflowers.

The surrealist master allowed his "hand-painted dream photographs" to explore the subconscious. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicted three melting watches draped over various objects in an eerily calm landscape.

Some have interpreted the fantastic image as a tribute to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Dali, always provocative, confessed that overripe camembert cheese inspired the image and that his paintings had many meanings at any given time.

"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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