Salvador Dali had average primary education, learning the basics of drawing and watercolour painting and discovering the beauty of calligraphy, then went to a Marist grammar school, the only Figueras school that had school-leaving examinations. During this time he painted his first pieces, showing houses and the Catalonian landscape. Seigfried Burmann was a German portrait and landscape painter who was on holiday in the area, and was amazed by Dali’s talent., and in 1914 gave him his first palette and tubes of paint. In 1917, Dali attended Professor Juan Núñez’s drawing course at the Escuela Municipal de Grabado. Salvador loved to do the opposite of what he was told to do. For example, when he was told to draw a beggar, Dali’s teacher said that he should use a soft pencil and just graze the paper lightly, so of course Dali covered his drawing in black until it was only a bunch of dark blotches, and then inked it over. At this point his only option was to use a scraping technique. He scratched away with his penknife and produced incredible whites. “Where I wanted my whites to emerge more subdued, I would spit directly on the given spot and my rubbing then produced peelings that were more greyish and dirty. Soon I mastered the operation if bringing out the pulp of the paper in such a way as really to look like a kind of down… it was, so to speak, the direct imitation of the old man’s beard.”