In the early 1860s, sculptor Elisabet Ney kept her studio in Berlin, where she had trained under the recently deceased Christian Daniel Rauch.

[2]: 29 In 1861 she received a commission for a portrait of the chemist Eilhard Mitscherlich, a prominent and much-decorated researcher at the Frederick William University in Berlin.

The marble is now held by the Natural History Museum in Berlin, while the plaster original was installed in Mitscherlich's mausoleum in the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof after his death.

Mitscherlich depicts its subject in his late sixties, unclothed, with bare shoulders and upper chest showing.

The piece blends neoclassical elements (such as the absence of clothing and unincised eyes) with realistic details, such as wrinkled skin and a receding hairline; this blending of classicism and realism is an approach to portraiture that reflects the stylistic influence of Ney's mentor, Christian Daniel Rauch.