According to research conducted in the archives of a Sussex country home, one of the world's most famous pieces of furniture, Salvador Dal's Mae West lips couch, began life as a drawing on the back of an envelope.

The drawing was discovered outside Chichester, at the old house of Dal's patron Edward James, and it shows the degree to which James was engaged in the design of the 1930s couch, according to experts. It is one of the surrealist movement's symbols, alongside the lobster telephone, which was also the product of a cooperation between Dal and James.

The discovery was discovered as part of West Dean's plans to digitize and publish online James' 2,300-item collection, which contains a tantalizing variety of letters, first editions, and drawings by a slew of 20th-century artists who were connected to James. Dal, whose work James once supported for a full year, is among them, as are surrealist artists René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Leonora Carrington, and Jean Cocteau. It also contains artists Pablo Picasso and Aldous Huxley and John Betjeman, as well as authors Aldous Huxley and John Betjeman.

Magritte's preliminary drawing for The Pleasure Principle, a Cocteau study of an Elsa Schiaparelli dress coat, letters to and from Carrington spanning decades, Picasso sketches, and original music scores by Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, and Bertolt Brecht are among the highlights.

According to Hugh Morrison, West Dean's collections manager, the Mae West couch was inspired by James's ambition in 1936 to create a completely surrealist interior at his London house on Wimpole Street. “This idea piqued Dal's interest, and the two of them started talking about it, each feeding off the other,” he adds.

In honor of the movie actress, Dal had previously drawn an idea for a project he called "Mae West's face that could be used as a surrealist apartment," and James proposed that West's lips could be the inspiration for a couch, and stated he would produce it. Edward Carrick, a designer with whom James was working at the time, is believed to have created the back-of-an-envelope drawing found in the collection.

The West Dean drawing refers to the first of the couches to be manufactured — definitely in Britain, according to Christopher Wilk, keeper of furniture, textiles, and fashion at the V&A, which possesses one of five known copies of the sofa. It was a pink satin variant, colored to match designer Schiaparelli's startling pink lipstick hue, for whose apartment it was perhaps intended.

According to letters in the James collection, he had planned to have this couch upholstered in leather until he found that it had been a mistake that Schiaparelli loved the concept; in reality, she despised it and stated she preferred it in satin. That version is currently in the West Dean collection; the V&A version is a later variant with vivid red wool upholstery and black fringe.

The tale of the lips couch, according to Wilk, presents intriguing issues regarding who is the creator of creative creations. "While the original concept was Dal's, much of the exacting work in actually creating the pieces was down to James," he adds, referring to the envelope drawing and communication.

James (1907-1984) was a colorful and complex figure whose life was often controversial: there was suspicion that he was the grandchild of King Edward VII, who was a frequent visitor to West Dean and was believed to be visiting his illicit daughter Evelyn, James's mother. James utilized his enormous money, the result of two inherited fortunes, to support surrealist artists in Europe and Mexico, where he spent a lot of time and built the Las Pozas concrete surrealist sculpture garden.

According to Morrison, James maintained a massive quantity of documentation, and deciphering the collection took many years. "It's full of treasures," he added, "and we're almost ready to share them with the rest of the world via digitisation." West Dean became an arts college in 1971, towards the end of James' life, and the goal is to celebrate the archive's 50th anniversary with a virtual opening.

The lips couch, according to Wilk, became famous in the 1960s and 1970s when it was reintroduced as proto-pop and given a new lease of life. Celebrities such as Kylie Minogue, Beyoncé, and Katy Perry have been seen posing on copies all over the globe. He remarked, "It's such an outrageous piece, and it was one of a kind – there was nothing else like it." "In the days of Dal and James, overt sexuality was frowned upon, but that is no longer the case. It was fashionable at the time, and it became a symbol of sexualization.”

There's a chance that another original couch exists somewhere, most likely in France. “We know that French designer Jean-Michel Frank may have created another sofa or two in Paris, so there's always the chance that we'll get lucky one day and find another one,” Wilk added.

Thanks to Joanna Moorhead at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.