A committed Surrealist for over seventy years, Conroy Maddox was a painter, writer and lecturer, and a key figure in the Birmingham Surrealist movement. He was described by his friend and contemporary Desmond Morris as "the most undiluted, unwavering Surrealist" in Britain. He was born in Ledbury, Herefordshire, and discovered Surrealism in 1935, spending the rest of his life exploring its potential through paintings, collages, photographs, objects and texts. Inspired by artists such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, he rejected academic painting in favour of techniques that expressed the surrealistic spirit of rebellion.

Conroy Maddox travelled to Paris many times between 1936 and 1939, attending meetings at Le Dôme Café and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and establishing lasting friendships with Man Ray and Georges Hugnet. This experiment in collage is believed to have been made during this period (although Maddox's dates can be notoriously unreliable), and perhaps predates one of the artist's best-known works, The Strange Country (1940), now in the collection of the Tate Gallery.

In Landscape with Figures, Maddox playfully pairs the incongruous images of a woman's breasts, sat atop a compote dish, with two diminutive figures in the background. According to the artist, his collages sprung from 'dislocated and disquieting images (…) dictated by desire'. They expressed his determination to manipulate and transform the established order, his 'desire to interfere'.