In 1969 Salvador Dalí illustrated a limited edition of the classic 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly referred to as Alice in Wonderland), written by Lewis Carroll.
The pool of tears image portrays Alice with a skipping rope below a deluge of tears.
In Carroll’s fairy tale, Alice finds herself in a room containing a table after falling through the rabbit hole. A small door presents escape from the room into a fantasy land, but Alice is too big to fit through the door. She drinks a potion to shrink herself so that she can fit through the door, before realising she has left the key on the unchanged table. Alice then eats cake which causes her to grow to giant size. Miserable Alice starts to cry and is eventually washed out of the room in a pool of her own tears after she uses a fan to shrink in size once again and use the key to open the door.