Salvador Dali was born in Figueras, Spain in 1904. He was actually the third Salvador Dali. His father was named Salvador and his brother was named Salvador. Salvador was born on the same day as his brother died so they chose to look at him as a reincarnation or their first son. The memory of him being a reincarnation of his dead brother haunted him for the rest of his life. One of his favorite pastimes was parading around the house in a blue sailor suit and sometimes an emperor costume. He was treated special because his parents were afraid he would die just like his brother did. This was the treatment when he was a young child that relates directly to his formation of very unique style of painting. When he was young, the local school children threw insects like grasshoppers at him which became a symbol of horror for Dali during his Surrealist period. In 1908, his parents had another child named Anna Maria Dali who became one of Dali's most close childhood attachments. He started painting at age 10 but he really started to show his potential at age 13. The man that started teaching Dali was a man named Juan Nunez.
B. Salvador Dali was part of the Surrealist period. Surrealism is a form of art that shows images that might be seen while sleeping and many of his paintings came from his dreams. There were two things that happened to Salvador Dali that brought him down the path to greatness. First, was his chance with meeting with Gala Eluard in 1929 who was the wife of the famous French poet, Paul Eulard but as soon as she and Dali met they became inseparable so Gala left her husband. The second was when he decided to join the Paris Surrealists the same year. In 1934 he was expelled from the Surrealist group of Paris. In most of Dali's painted works he used watercolors. In 1938, Dali got to meet the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Then in 1940 Dali and Gala went to the United States until 1948.