At a glance they seem like familiar 19th-century botanical lithographs, the type you see on endless hotel room walls. But look closer and the plum appears to be running away, the raspberries look embarrassed and the grapefruit … well, it's enough to make the viewer blush.
The 14 original watercolour fruit studies are in fact by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali and are remarkable because they have remained more or less hidden since 1969, the year of their creation.
"They are wonderful, wonderful things," said William O'Reilly, director of impressionist and modern art at Bonhams, the auction house that announced their saleon Wednesday. "One reason being they are so fresh and are absolutely unseen." They were commissioned in 1969 by the publisher Jean-Paul Schneider and then became a series of lithographs. The publisher kept the originals until they were sold in 2000 to an unnamed European collector who is now selling them.
"No one had ever seen the original watercolours," said O'Reilly, who recalled the thrill of entering the seller's house "and there they were on the wall, it was completely unexpected. That sort of thing doesn't happen a lot."
The works have names such as Hasty Plum, Raspberry Blush, Wild Blackberries and Erotic Grapefruit, which includes a leaf falling backwards as it is drenched by a shower of juice.
Each painting is valued at £40,000-£70,000 with the series expected to make close to £1m. O'Reilly said the paintings shone a light on the artist's hyper-fertile imagination, but said they were subversive and ahead of their time as well as entertaining. Here is Dali taking genuine 19th-century botanical lithographs and painting over them in much the same way as the Chapman Brothers took real Goya prints and embellished them, he said.
The works will be sold at Bonhams, London, on 18 June.