By the time Mediumistic Paranoiac Image was painted, Dali and Gala had formed a close relationship with the English collector Edward James, who contracted to buy the artist's entire output; the arrangement gave Dali an assured income during the years when the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) had unsettled his life and he lived mainly in France. At one time James owned 40 important works by Dali, including this one and The Phantom Cart and Paranoiac-Critical Solitude.

These were quite small (Mediumistic-Paranoiac Image is only 19 x 23 cm/772 x 9 in), but Dali also painted larger canvases, such as Impressions of Africa, for James. Despite its title, Mediumistic-Paranoiac Image is almost Victorian in its realistic and innocently peaceful picture of the seaside, very much at odds with Dali's normally subversive imagery.