This room belonged to the Menzel family's apartment on Schöneberger Strasse, at the time on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin, where the artist lived with his mother and siblings.

During this time he also made the illustrations for the multi-volume history of Frederick the Great by Franz Theodor Kugler (until 1842), which marked his artistic breakthrough.

It is a woodcut of the round library in Sanssouci Palace, which shows the windows that reach down to the floor flooded with light.

In January 1903, two years before Menzel's death, Hugo von Tschudi acquired the picture as director of the Nationalgalerie.

The light illuminates the polished wooden floor and the wall mirror, which half reflects an indefinable gold-framed picture in the invisible area of the room above the sofa.

The wall, which takes up the entire left half of the picture, has a surface in a lighter color scheme with a recognizable structure of the paint application.

Viewers asked themselves whether the picture was possibly unfinished there, whether it is a reflection of light or whether a new coat of paint on the wall has been interrupted.