Salvador Dalí was a central artist within the Surrealist movement in Paris. Although Dalí was criticized for accommodating Franco's regime, André Breton, the Surrealist leader and poet, asked him to represent Spain at the 1959 Homage to Surrealism Exhibition which celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Surrealism. In line with the Surrealist movement's objectives, Dalí stated that his artistic aim was that "...the world of imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident ... as that of the exterior world...", and this goal can be seen in one of his most familiar paintings, "The Persistence of Memory". Here he paints with a precise, realistic style, based on studies of Dutch and Spanish masters, but with a subject that dissolves the boundaries between organic and mechanical and is more akin to the nightmarish scenes of the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose "Garden of Earthly Delights" provided the model for the central, sleeping figure of Dalí's work.