Maddox is one of the most important figures in the history of British Surrealism. In the late 1930s he became a member of the British Surrealist Group and began to produce paintings drawing on his ‘dreams and obsessions and fears’.He wrote ‘this collage-painting was suggested by a number of events of a criminal nature... The works itself bears the form of bulletin board, and the design of the figure wearing the hats was, for instance, based on a photograph in a forgotten publication, of a murderer whose wardrobe contained some 300 hats’.