The painting is made of two canvases, each 60 by 60 centimetres, showing Dalí and Gala from behind as they paint each other, but painted from two slightly different viewpoints^[2]. Viewed normally, side by side, the two canvases look almost the same. Viewed through a stereoscope, which presents one image to each eye, the small disparity between the viewpoints resolves into a single image with the illusion of depth, the same principle behind stereoscopic photography and the earlier hand-drawn stereoscope experiments of the nineteenth century^[3]. Dalí executed the two versions deliberately for this purpose, simulating a three-dimensional experience within a medium, oil paint on canvas, that is ordinarily flat^[2].

This painting belongs to the final phase of Dalí's career, when his long-standing fascination with optical effects, anamorphic forms and negative space, present throughout his work, expanded to take in holography and stereoscopy directly^[2]. That shift followed a period, beginning around 1969, in which Dalí became increasingly absorbed in optics, holography, science and mathematics, purchasing Púbol Castle for Gala that year and pursuing what one biographer describes as a quest to master three-dimensional images^[2]. By 1972 his holograms were being exhibited at New York's Knoedler Gallery, and the stereoscopic paintings that followed, including this one, extended that experimentation into a medium Dalí had worked in for half a century^[2]. He opened the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, the building where this painting now hangs, on 28 September 1974^[2].

A special exhibition at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres in 2015 grouped this painting with several related late works exploring the same optical territory: Gala's Foot, According to Las Meninas by Velázquez, The Structure of DNA, and two further paintings depicting Dalí revealing Gala within an imagined landscape^[2]. Taken together, these pieces represent, in the judgment of one recent study of Dalí's late career, the most memorable works of his final period, and among them this double portrait is considered the most fully realised^[2].