Trompe l'Oeil Toilets
    or
Ceci n'est pas une toilette

René Magritte was a famous Belgian surrealist artist (and also see the Toiletological Statues page for other Belgian surrealism related to toilets). One of his most famous works is La Trahison des Images, known in English as The Treachery of Images. It's the painting of a pipe, with the label Ceci n'est pas une pipe, or, in English, This is not a pipe. Magritte's point was that it was not a pipe, it was a picture of a pipe.

The whole point of trompe l'oeil (or "trick of the eye") art is convincingly realistic rendering. See, for example, the Warner Brothers cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote creates a trompe l'oeil image of a tunnel on a rock face at the end of a dead-end road. The Roadrunner can enter the tunnel but the Coyote cannot. And — unfortunately for the Coyote — large trucks, buses, and trains can suddenly exit the image.

Here is an example of trompe l'oeil artwork in the toilet. This is one of the toilets at the Castle Rock Hostel in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Approaching...

Entering...

At left: the view from the loo.

Obviously this one needs the blue Sani-Flush border indicating one that I've used...

So is this really a trompe l'oeil toilet? The thing I was photographing was a trompe l'oeil fireplace next to a real, functioning toilet.

But I will use Magritte's argument to say that my page is correctly titled. The toilet was a real toilet, yes. But this page is not a real toilet, it a collection of pictures of one!

Of course, you can argue that all my pages are nothing but pictures of toilets, and therefore they are all trompe l'oeil toilets. But then this page would contain a picture of a picture of a fireplace, and I'm not sure what to call double trompe-l'oeilism.

Also see the British Toilets page.

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