From her earliest work, Adnams played with discrepancies of scale and the creation of unlikely narratives in a surrealist way. She recorded that 'When I first went to see René Magritte at the Tate I saw him for the first time and I nearly passed out. So often the same thought had been with me".

In 1930, Adnams started attending life classes at Derby School of Art. She was gratified to find her natural ability to draw recognised, though perhaps less so in the terms her talent was acknowledged, with one teacher remarking, 'she drew like a man, direct, with no rubbing out'. The ornamental dogs featured in this painting were from Adnams' own collection of Staffordshire pottery. A study of this work exists which shows the artist added a piece of paper to the left-hand side, suggesting that having at first intended to draw only one of the pair, Adnams felt a compulsion to unite it with its twin.