From the Forties, Dalí was becoming increasingly religious. He wrote in the epilogue to his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, "heaven is what I have been seeking all along and through the density of confused and demoniac flesh of my life-heaven!" He had always been enchanted by the idea of angels, the ethereal emissaries of God who are the go-betweens for our world and heaven. Dalí has painted many versions of angels, seeing them in different forms. He saw his spindly-legged elephants as a kind of angel, as with their great height they were halfway to heaven while still connected to the earth, much like angels.
    Etudes d'Anges (literally study of angels), is drawn in ball-point pen on the headed stationery of Del Monte Lodge at Pebble Beach, California. The Dalís stayed at this hotel during the summers while they were living in the US between the years 1940 and 1950. Although Etudes d'Anges is essentially a brief sketch, it was possibly a study for a work that Dalí was composing at the time.

    Dalí believed that Family of Marsupial Centaurs evinced his return to a Classical style, with a more precise technique and greater balance. He attributed the painting to Dr. Otto Rank, a psychoanalyst who theorized that neurosis could be traced back to birth trauma. Believing that he had pre-birth memories, Dalí was greatly interested in Dr. Rank's work.
    The female centaurs have openings in their stomachs out of which human babies wait to be pulled free. In The Secret Life, Dalí wrote that he envied the centaurs because "the children can come out of, and go back into, the maternal uterine paradise".
    The seascape here is the same as the one seen in Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee (1944). It is based around Cadaqués, so even though Dalí was living in the US, he was painting the landscape of his homeland.
    The configuratipn of a horse's rear is a shape that Dalí used in many paintings, often as a visual illusion. He saw a similarity of form between the horse's rear and a bunch of grapes, and to emphasize this he gives one centaur grapes to hold up.