How does this artwork elucidate its Description?
The painting has the dimensions 58 by 47 cm and is executed using the painting technique of oil on canvas. Menzel's signature is on the lower right: AM / 45. The art dealer R. Wagner bought it from the artist in Berlin. In January 1903, two years before Menzel's death, Hugo von Tschudi acquired the picture as director of the Nationalgalerie. Since then it has had the inventory number AI 744.
The picture creates the atmosphere of a bourgeois apartment on a summer afternoon. The cool comfort of the room contrasts with the heat outside. The room is noticeably sparsely furnished or cleared out and is flooded with sunlight that penetrates through a white curtain. The curtain is slightly puffed, which suggests a weak gust of wind. In its emptiness, the room looks almost dull. It has just a few everyday pieces of furniture: a mirror, two arbitrarily placed chairs facing each other, a modest carpet and a dimly indicated sofa on the left edge of the painting, which appears more clearly in the mirror, are there. The room appears uncomfortable  completely in contrast to the usual room paintings of the Biedermeier period that convey comfort, prosperity and a sense of style. It is deserted, carelessly furnished and unspectacularly usual. Nothing is staged or told here. In Menzel's representationally empty picture, the restrained colors alone appear independent, atmospherically fresh and lively. In particular, the incidence of light through the open balcony door gives the picture its enigmatic charm. 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. However, according to the art historian Claude Keisch, the composition of the left half of the picture with its shadowy sofa does not allow any “plasticity”.
Biedermeier Berlin