This painting of golden lion tamarins was included in Shackleton's An Autobiography in Paintings (1998), where he writes that it was comissioned as part of a set for the People's Trust for Endangered Species 1987 fundraising calendar. Describing the process of painting the tamarins, he writes:

'these were the most twitched-up frenetic animals I have ever met. They were never still for an instant. If they ever stopped leaping around it would be to have a scratch, and that so driven by urgency, the hand or foot involved became as blurred as a hummingbird's wing.

They were not the easiest of animals to draw, but occasionaly they would freeze for perhaps half a second, affording that fleeting image that finds its way into subliminal advertising. The pencil would scribble a few lines while a charged memory tried to do the rest.

In those frozen-frame stills they offered, it was the eyes that were all-powerful - little round ones like greasy boot-buttons. Their heads were close together, peering from different angles - in duplicate. I bagan to feel that a little more of this kind of appraisal and I would find myself up in the trees and doing the same'.