Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy (1900-55), was a French-born American painter, born in Brittany, France on January 5th 1900. He was originally a merchant seaman, and was drafted into the army during World War I. Tanguy was impelled to take up painting after seeing pictures by de Chirico and in 1925, he joined the Surrealist Movement where he was welcomed by André Breton. Tanguy incorporated into his work the images of geological formations he had observed during a trip to Africa in 1930.

He exhibited extensively during the 1930's in solo and Surrealist group shows in New York, Brussels, Paris, and London. In 1939 he emigrated to the USA, where he lived for the rest of his life, marrying the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage in 1940 and becoming an American citizen in 1948.

Tanguy's most characteristic works are painted in a scrupulous technique reminiscent of that of Dalí, but his imagery is highly distinctive, featuring half marine and half lunar landscapes in which amorphous nameless objects proliferate in a spectral dream-space (The Invisibles, Tate Gallery, London, 1951). A retrospective of Tanguy's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York eight months after his death on January 15th 1955, in Woodbury, Connecticut.