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Golconda (in French, Golconde) is an oil painting on canvas by Belgian surrealist René Magritte,...

Golconda (in French, Golconde) is an oil painting on canvas by Belgian surrealist René Magritte, painted in 1953. It is currently housed at the Menil collection in Houston, Texas. The piece depicts a scene of nearly identical men who have slight differences dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be floating like helium balloons (though there is no actual indication of motion), against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky. The men are spaced in a hexagonal grids facing the view point and receding back in grid layers. Magritte himself lived in a similar suburban environment, and dressed in a similar fashion. The bowler hat was a common feature of much of his work, and appears in paintings like The Son of Man. Charly Herscovici, who was bequeathed copyright on the artist's works, commented on Golconda: As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India near Hyderabad, which from the mid­fourteenth century till the end of the seventeenth was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's