A man in a bowler hat, a calm sea, a cloudy sky, and a green apple hovering where his face should be. Almost everyone misses that his left elbow bends backwards. This deep dive examines René Magritte's 1964 self-portrait The Son of Man, a roughly 45-by-35-inch canvas that confronts viewers at near life size, with one eye peeking over the apple to watch you while denying you a full look at him.

We unpack the cognitive psychology of obstruction and the brain's face-processing circuitry, the sister works from the same period including The Great War, A Taste of the Invisible, and Man in the Bowler Hat, the sale to Harry Torczyner in 1964 and the 1998 Christie's auction where it fetched over $5.3 million, and its ironic disappearance into a private collection. Then we trace how the image escaped the canvas into Norman Rockwell's Mr. Apple, The T ...