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The painting is set on a barren, mute landscape with a mostly monochromatic color scheme. To the left, the painting's titular character, the Chemist, has one leg on a rock and is lifting the edge of a grand piano which blends into the landscape. The instrument appears to have the consistency of a piece of cloth as if it has melted into the ground, no longer a solid object; this a quintessentially surrealist technique which appears prominently in many of Dalí's works, including The Persistence of Memory.
The painting was originally titled, Instantaneous presence of Louis II of Bavaria, Salvador Dalí, Lenin, and Wagner on the beach at Rosas, which sheds light on the identities of the characters present in the painting; the original titular figures were described by Dalí as "all the real and fantastic personages of the modern tragedy" – although many of them are admittedly difficult to distinguish with certainty in the painting's current form.  In the center of the painting sits German composer Richard Wagner in his distinctive beret-and-robe regalia. The ashen-faced man in the forefront depicted laying down and reading a newspaper bears a resemblance to Vladimir Lenin, a possible nod to surrealism's Communist underpinnings, and the Chemist is Friedrich Nietzsche, another intellectual Dalí admired.Just beside Wagner stands a small boy carrying a hoop and stick, accoutrements used in a children's game known as hoop rolling, who is looking across the landscape at a woman garbed in a white dress out in the distance. And in the far right of the painting stands an African woman with pink, flowery hair wearing an orange dress staring in the direction of the Chemist.
The largely monotone color scheme juxtaposes the vibrant, almost holy, bright aura of yellow light surrounding Wagner, as well as a bright blue patch of sky in the upper right-hand corner visible through the clouds.
Communist Vladimir Lenin hoop rolling Salvador Dalí surrealism The Persistence of Memory Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner