Produced in 1979, Picture for Women is a key early work in Wall's career and exemplifies a number of conceptual, material and visual concerns found in his art throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Jeff Wall, born September 29, 1946, in Vancouver, is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing.

[2] Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School[3] and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace.

The photographs' compositions often allude to historical artists like Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet,[6] or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.

[8] According to Tate Modern, this success allows Wall to reference "both popular culture (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) and the sense of scale he admires in classical painting.

[11] It was photographed in a borrowed studio in Vancouver in winter 1979 and printed on two separate pieces of film which are joined using clear tape, with the transparency layers overlapping, creating a thin dark seam.

Group exhibitions exhibiting Picture for Women include New York and Ottawa in 1980, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington and Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston in 1981, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Renaissance Society, Chicago and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1984, Musée National d'Art Moderne-Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1987 and 1995.