René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964, oil on canvas, 45.67” x 35”, Private Collection, Photo by Williamo! via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.
The Son of Man, a painting of a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat whose face is obscured by a floating green apple, actually is a self-portrait by Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte. You can see part of his left eye peering at you from behind the apple.
Of course, the title suggests a reference to the apple from the Garden of Eden, or the sin that obscures human virtue, but this may be a red herring. Surrealist artists, influenced as they were by Freudian psychology, were engaged with the idea that there are truths that lie underneath the surface of things.
About this image, Magritte said, “At least it hides the face partly well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.”
