The elephant first appears in several paintings of the mid-1940s, including the The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1948 (coll. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). Dalí derived the imagery from the 17th Century Italian sculptor Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, who incorporated an elephant bearing an obelisk into a monument planned for the garden of the Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Dalí later executed sculptures based on this image, calling it the Space Elephant.

Robert Descharnes has confirmed the authenticity of this watercolor.