Sage’s artistic career took shape after she left her first husband, an Italian nobleman, in 1935. Moving to Paris, she became interested in surrealism, particularly the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, and she exhibited her first surrealist pictures in 1938. This watercolor dates to her formative experiments with the movement. It portrays an egg in a room filled with columns and ribbed vaulting reminiscent of Gothic architecture. The perspective is oddly disjointed, conveying a sense of disorientation and instability as the floor tilts precariously toward the picture plane.

Sage created this work for The Minutes, a series of 24 drawings, 23 of which portray eggs in strange and uninhabited spaces. Her use of the egg motif is cryptic, but eggs frequently appear in surrealist works of the period, where they symbolized creative gestation, hidden interiority, and fragility.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)