Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech, Marquis of Dali de Pubol (11 May 1904 - 23 January 1989), known professionally as Salvador Dali ( Catalan: [s@lb@'do d@'li]; Spanish: [salba'dor da'li]), was a prominent Spanish surrealist born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dali was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech was born on 11 May 1904, at 8:45 am GMT, on the first floor of Carrer Monturiol, 20 (presently 6), in the town of Figueres, in the Emporda region, close to the French border in Catalonia, Spain. In the summer of 1912, the family moved to the top floor of Carrer Monturiol 24 (presently 10). Dali's older brother, who had also been named Salvador (born 12 October 1901), had died of gastroenteritis nine months earlier, on 1 August 1903. His father, Salvador Dali i Cusi, was a middle-class lawyer and notary whose strict disciplinary approach was tempered by his wife, Felipa Domenech Ferres, who encouraged her son's artistic endeavors.  When he was five, Dali was taken to his brother's grave and told by his parents that he was his brother's reincarnation, a concept which he came to believe. Of his brother, Dali said, "[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections." He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute." Images of his long-dead brother would reappear embedded in his later works, including Portrait of My Dead Brother (1963).  Dali also had a sister, Anna Maria, who was three years younger. In 1949, she published a book about her brother, Dali as Seen by His Sister. His childhood friends included future FC Barcelona footballers Sagibarba and Josep Samitier. During holidays at the Catalan resort of Cadaques, the trio played football (soccer) together.  Dali attended drawing school. In 1916, he also discovered modern painting on a summer vacation trip to Cadaques with the family of Ramon Pichot, a local artist who made regular trips to Paris. The next year, Dali's father organized an exhibition of his charcoal drawings in their family home. He had his first public exhibition at the Municipal Theatre in Figueres in 1919, a site he would return to decades later.  In February 1921, Dali's mother died of breast cancer. Dali was 16 years old; he later said his mother's death "was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul." After her death, Dali's father married his deceased wife's sister. Dali did not resent this marriage, because he had a great love and respect for his aunt.

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