ONE of the most famous works of the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali, the Lobster Telephone, has been bought by the National Galleries of Scotland.

The art work, for which Dali replaced a handset with a crustacean, has been bought for £853,000 with grants from the Art Fund and the Henry and Sula Walton Fund.

It has recently been sold at auction and was due to leave the UK, but the NGS have bought it after its export was temporarily barred.

Michael Ellis, UK arts minister, put the export bar on the art work in March.

Now the piece, created in 1938, will go on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in Edinburgh, this week.

It consists of an ordinary, working telephone, upon which rests a lobster made from plaster, which fits over the receiver.

Lobster Telephone was made in 1938 for Edward James, Dalí’s main patron in the 1930s.

James, born in 1907, was "immensely wealthy" and had a summer house in Gullane, East Lothian.

He met Dalí in 1934 and the two became friends.

Dalí visited James in London on several occasions and James bought many of the artist’s works "straight off the easel."

Dalí made furnishings for his friend included the noted Mae West Lips sofas, which were shaped in the form of the Hollywood actress’s lips, lamp stands in the form of stacked champagne glasses, and the Lobster Telephones.

Eleven were made to fit telephones at his house in London, and his house in Monkton, West Sussex.

Four were red, and seven were white, and many are now in museum collections.

They are cast in plaster, hollowed out underneath, and with a hole in the tail to take the telephone flex, they fit over the standard receivers of the period.

Eight are in museum collections in Australia, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, the USA and the Tate in London and one is in a private collection abroad.

The white telephone bought for the Scottish collections has been with the Edward James Foundation, in West Sussex.

It was recently sold at auction and would have left Britain, but it was subject to a Government export license deferral.

The purchase was made possible by the Henry and Sula Walton Fund (£753,000), and Art Fund (£100,000).

Henry Walton was a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh and Sula Walton was a renowned child psychiatrist.

They left their art collection to the National Galleries of Scotland and also set up charitable fund, designed to help the galleries acquire works of modern art.

Simon Groom, director of modern and contemporary art at the National Galleries of Scotland said: “This major acquisition cements our position as one of the world’s greatest collections of Surrealist art. Object sculptures – where the artist takes an existing, manufactured object and transforms it with a slight addition or alteration – were popular among the Surrealists, but are now incredibly rare.

"They turned convention upside-down, saying that anything could be art, and that art and life were not separate.

"Dalí created something incredibly rich, imaginative and funny with the most economical of means.

"Before this acquisition we had nothing of this kind."

He added: "This type of work had a huge impact on later artists, including Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

"We’re immensely grateful to the Walton Fund and the Art Fund for their help in acquiring the work: both funds also helped enormously with the purchase of Leonora Carrington’s Portrait of Max Ernst, c.1939, in the summer.

"It has been an amazing year for the growth of our Surrealist collection.”