Collection: Le Château d'Otrante

The Castle of Otranto, illustrated by Salvador Dalí

This significant portfolio represents a meeting of minds across two centuries: Salvador Dalí and Horace Walpole. Widely considered the first Gothic novel, Dalí found a text that was "Surrealist" nearly two hundred years before the movement existed. The story is filled with irrational terror and dream-logic imagery, including bleeding statues, walking portraits, and a giant helmet falling from the sky.

Dalí captures this uneasy atmosphere through 12 haunting original copperplate etchings. Using stark, wispy, and scratchy lines, he translates the text into a visual nightmare. Uniquely, the plates were printed off-center on elongated paper, a deliberate layout choice that heightens the sense of disorientation and surrealist tension that defines the interpretation.  Published by Le Club Français du Livre, Paris, 1964 and limited to just 180 copies, of which and including these, only 89 were printed on Arches.