The Difficult Crossing (La traversée difficile) is the name given to two oil-on-canvas

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

 paintings by the Belgian

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

 surrealist

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 René Magritte

René Magritte

René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...

. The original version was completed in 1926 during Magritte's early prolific years of surrealism and is currently held in a private collection. A later version was completed in 1963 and is also held in a private collection. A version is currently on display at the Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool is an art gallery and museum in Liverpool, Merseyside, England, and part of Tate, along with Tate St Ives, Cornwall, Tate Britain, London, and Tate Modern, London. The museum was an initiative of the Merseyside Development Corporation...

 during their Magritte exhibition.

The 1926 version

The 1926 version contains a number of curious elements, some of which are common to many of Magritte's works.

The bilboquet or baluster

Baluster

A baluster is a moulded shaft, square or of lathe-turned form, one of various forms of spindle in woodwork, made of stone or wood and sometimes of metal, standing on a unifying footing, and supporting the coping of a parapet or the handrail of a staircase. Multiplied in this way, they form a...

 (the object which looks like the bishop

Bishop (chess)

A bishop is a piece in the board game of chess. Each player begins the game with two bishops. One starts between the king's knight and the king, the other between the queen's knight and the queen...

 from a chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 set) first appears in the painting The Lost Jockey (1926). In this and some other works—for example The Secret Player (1927) and The Art of Conversation (1961)—the bilboquet seems to play an inanimate role analogous to a tree

Tree

A tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to...

 or plant

Plant

Plants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. Precise definitions of the kingdom vary, but as the term is used here, plants include familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The group is also called green plants or...

. In other instances, such as here with The Difficult Crossing, the bilboquet is given the anthropomorphic feature of a single eye

Human eye

The human eye is an organ which reacts to light for several purposes. As a conscious sense organ, the eye allows vision. Rod and cone cells in the retina allow conscious light perception and vision including color differentiation and the perception of depth...

.

Another common feature of Magritte's works seen here is the ambiguity between windows and paintings. The back of the room shows a boat

Boat

A boat is a watercraft of any size designed to float or plane, to provide passage across water. Usually this water will be inland or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In naval terms, a boat is a...

 in a thunderstorm

Thunderstorm

A thunderstorm, also known as an electrical storm, a lightning storm, thundershower or simply a storm is a form of weather characterized by the presence of lightning and its acoustic effect on the Earth's atmosphere known as thunder. The meteorologically assigned cloud type associated with the...

, but the viewer is left to wonder if the depiction is a painting or the view out a window. Magritte elevated the idea to another level in his series of works based on The Human Condition

The Human Condition (painting)

The Human Condition generally refers to two similar oil on canvas paintings by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. One was completed in 1933 and is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The other was completed in 1935 and is part of the Simon Spierer Collection in...

where "outdoor" paintings and windows both appear and even overlap.

The front right leg of the table

Table (furniture)

A table is a form of furniture with a flat and satisfactory horizontal upper surface used to support objects of interest, for storage, show, and/or manipulation...

 resembles a human leg

Human leg

The human leg is the entire lower extremity or limb of the human body, including the foot, thigh and even the hip or gluteal region; however, the precise definition in human anatomy refers only to the section of the lower limb extending from the knee to the ankle.Legs are used for standing,...

.

The 1963 version

In the 1963 version, a number of elements have changed or disappeared. Instead of taking place in a room, the action has moved outside. There is no table or hand clutching a bird and the scene of the rough sea in the ambiguous window/painting at the rear becomes the entire new background. Near the front a low brick wall is seen with a bilboquet behind and a suited figure with an eyeball for a head in front.

There is ambiguity as to whether the suited figure is a man or another bilboquet. Some bilboquet figures, for example those in The Encounter (1929), have similar eyeball heads, however the suit covers the body and no clear identification can be made.

Relation to other paintings

Both versions of The Difficult Crossing show a strong similarity to Magritte's painting The Birth of the Idol, also from 1926. The scene is outside and depicts a rough sea in the background (this time without ship). Objects which appear include a bilboquet (the non-anthropomorphic variety), a mannequin arm (similar to the hand which clutches the bird) and a wooden board with window-like holes cut out which is nearly identical to those flanking both sides of the room in earlier version.

All three paintings may have been inspired by Giorgio de Chirico's

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...

 Metaphysical Interior (1916) which features a room with a number of strange objects and an ambiguous window/painting showing a boat. Magritte was certainly aware of De Chirico's work and was emotionally moved by his first viewing of a reproduction of Song of Love

Love Song (Giorgio de Chirico)

The Song of Love is a painting by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico...

(1913–14).