[2] The painting depicts a red colored wall of the artist's studio at night, upon which are hung a series of plaster casts illuminated from below.

The casts include portrait busts, death masks and life masks of friends of the artist, children, classical personae such as Dante and Schiller, male and female torsos, a dog and possibly Goethe or Wagner;[2] art historian Werner Hofmann saw this assemblage as a conscious blurring of "the dividing line between fame and anonymity.

[5] Studio Wall is also seen as related to Menzel's larger painting Iron Rolling Mill (1872–1875), for which it may have served as a study in dramatic lighting, yet it has greater import than that of a merely preparatory exercise, and may have functioned as a kind of memorial: the central death mask is that of the artist's friend Friedrich Eggers, the first critic sympathetic to Menzel's work.

[8][9] Fried rejects Hofman's view of fragmentariness and anti-academicism, seeing the picture as a structured composition of objects arranged in successive rows.

[8] For Fried the likeliest allegorical meaning would be the sublimation of tangible existence to that of "phantasmagorias", a world inhabited by ghosts in the form of plaster casts.