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The core of the sessions was a trio of Gabriel, Lanois and the guitarist David Rhodes, who sketched songs against a drum machine. Bass and drums, mainly from Tony Levin and Manu Katche, were added later. Engineer Kevin Killen locked certain vocal takes as masters so that the lyrics could still be changed. The album cost 200,000 pounds to make.

It spent 93 weeks on the US chart and went five times platinum there and three times platinum in the UK. Jon Pareles of the New York Times praised how it joined exotic rhythms and instruments with ingenuity and conviction. Singles included Sledgehammer, In Your Eyes, Don't Give Up and Big Time. A 25th-anniversary box set appeared in 2012, the same year as the Back to Front tour, on which Gabriel played the album in full.

Writing for Pitchfork in 2020, Eric Harvey called it a 1986 art-pop masterpiece and a turning point in the commercial globalization of pop music. He pointed to the album's mix of musicians, among them Manu Katche, Youssou N'Dour, the violinist L. Shankar and the percussionist Djalma Correa, and to Mercy Street, which was inspired by a poem by Anne Sexton. On vinyl the album had eight tracks, because This Is the Picture was CD only until 2002.