The Invention of the Monsters was painted by Dalí between 1935 and 1940. This painting reflects the troubled times before World War II. In The Invention of the Monsters, Dalí has painted his premonition of World War II. Dalí began the picture in 1937, in Paris, in his studio on rue de la Tombe-Issoire and resumed work on it at the winter-sports resort of Semmering, south of Vienna. When Dalí learned that the Art Institute of Chicago had acquired this work, he sent a telegram with the following explanation: "Am happy and honored by your acquisition. According to Nostradamus, the apparition of monsters is a presage of war. This canvas was painted in the mountains of Semmering a few months before the Anschluss and it has a prophetic character. The women-horses represent the maternal river-monsters, the flaming giraffe the male cosmic apocalyptic monster. The angel-cat is the divine heterosexual monster, the hour-glass the metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí together the sentimental monster. The little lonely blue dog is not a true monster." The theme of the women-horses that one sees here in a herd bathing in a pond is the same as in Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion. Here the shapes have changed completely: three years later they will give birth to a series of pictures entitled The Marsupial Centaurs. About the double figure seen in the foreground, holding a butterfly and an hourglass in his hands, the painter has stated precisely that it was the Pre-Raphaelite result of the double portrait of Dalí and Gala painted right behind it.