Born into a family of artists and informally trained by his father, Doyle worked as a surveyor in Edinburgh and produced illustrations for books and journals to support his growing family. He gained some renown for his paintings of fairies, made while he was housed in an asylum from 1881. His sketchbooks of drawings and watercolors from this later period explore themes of magic and death, and it may be that this depiction of a plume of chimney smoke metamorphosing into a reptilian goblin dates from this time.