屈弗利耶夫婦, 布魯塞爾（約1942-43年間購自藝術家本人；賣出：倫敦蘇富比, 12月3日, 1970年, 拍品編號105）
私人收藏, 美國（購自上述拍賣會）
由現有藏家2006年購自上述人士

大衛•西爾維斯特、薩拉•威菲、邁克爾•雷布恩, 《勒內•馬格里特專題目錄：水粉、蛋彩、水彩和剪貼作品, 1918年至1967年》, 第IV冊, 倫敦, 1994年, 品號1182, 圖版頁55

Executed on paper laid down on board. Under UV light, there are isolated spots of inpainting in the background outside the wooden frame as well as other extensive inpainting particularly in the shelf and sphere in the foreground. There are two vertical 10-inch lines of inpainting descending from the top edge right of center.
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Magritte painted Le Repos de l'esprit while living in Paris after the German occupation of Belgium and Holland. In re🌄sistance to the anxiety of the war years, Magritte employed a lighter palette in much of his work at the time.

According to the catalogue raisonné, the silhouette of the cut-out bird is very closely related to that of the bird in Le Retour (Sylvester, no. 485), from 1940. Magritte depicts his subjects with great attention to detail, and his use of realism in these works challenged the dominant shift towards abstraction in modern art. Siegfried Gohr writes: "The crisis of vision prompted again and again by Magritte cannot be reduced to the sense that the world has gone off the rails; rather, it evokes a world that has become questionable, in the truest sense of the word, to its core. Magritte demonstrates this not by means of abstract experiments but by investigating concrete properties of objects, sensed in quite individual terms" (S. Gohr, "The Charming Provocateur," in René Magritte: The Key to Dreams (exhibi🐲tion catalogue), Vienna, 2005, pp. 23-24).

In the foreground of the present work, Magritte depicts a framed composition just beyond a stone ledge. The artist often returned to this technique of including compositions within compositions, emphasizing the process of presentation. Within the frame, Magritte presents the image of a bird in flight. Implicitly related to this image, an egg rests on the ledge in the foreground. A sun-filled landscape with a mountain range provides the background. The presentation of objects out of their usual context and the destabilization of the known world were constant themes in Magritte's art. In his essay 'La ligne de vie', written in 1938, Magritte commented on the relation of objects and place in his work: "As my research had necessarily to arrive at a single correct answer for each object, my investigation took the form of trying to find the solution of a problem with three points of reference: the object, the something linked to it in the obscurity of my consciousness and the light into which the something had to be brought" (ibid., p. 24).