THE National Galleries of Scotland yesterday announced it had acquired the Lobster Telephone, one of the most iconic works by Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, which will now go on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The small sculpture is one of the most instantly recognisable masterpieces of Surrealism, the art movement that emerged in Paris in the 1920s and explored the world of dreams and the subconscious mind.

It consists of an ordinary, working telephone, upon which rests a plaster lobster specially made to fit directly over the receiver.

HOW MUCH DID IT COST?

WHEN it was sold at auction in March, the Lobster Telephone fetched £853,000. Arts minister Michael Ellis put a temporary export ban on the sculpture to allow a UK organisation time to match the price, and the National Galleries of Scotland stepped in with support from the Henry and Sula Walton Fund (£753,000), and Art Fund (£100,000).

Henry Walton, who died in 2012, was a Professor of Psychiatry at Edinburgh University and his wife, Sula Walton, was an internationally renowned child psychiatrist. They were passionate devotees of the arts and left their art collection to the National Galleries of Scotland. They also established an independent, charitable fund, designed to help the Galleries acquire major works of modern art. Thus far, the Walton Fund has assisted in the purchase of works by Pablo Picasso, Jenny Saville, Toyen and Leonora Carrington – works which would otherwise have been outwith the Galleries’ reach.

WHY IS THIS WORK SO IMPORTANT?

LOBSTER Telephone was made in 1938 for Scots-born Edward James (1907-1984), Dali’s main patron in the 1930s. Only 11 of the plaster lobster receivers were made to fit to telephones at James’s house in Wimpole Street, London and at his country house, Monkton, in West Sussex. Four of the lobsters were painted red, and seven were painted white. The Lobster Telephones are now almost all in museum collections around the world: the Tate in London has a red version on a black telephone. This white version remained with the Edward James Foundation.

As the National Galleries explained: “The Surrealists loved the idea of unrelated objects coming together to create a new kind of reality, which subverted the rational and tapped into the subconscious. The bizarre combination of a phone and a lobster is at once absurd, repellent, fascinating and menacing, yet it is nevertheless a fully functioning phone.”

WHAT OTHER WORKS BY DALI AND TH E SURREALISTS ARE THERE IN SCOTLAND?

THE National Galleries of Scotland has one of the world’s greatest collections of Surrealist art, including paintings by Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Paul Delvaux, Toyen, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and others, and sculptures by Alberto Giacometti.

However, until now there has been no major Object Sculpture in the collection: they were quickly assembled for exhibition at the time, and were often simply discarded – so they are rare. Obtaining Dali’s Lobster Telephone is a huge coup for the National Galleries.

The artist’s most famous work in Scotland is his painting Christ of St John of the Cross which hangs in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Gallery.