This painting belongs to a series of interiors painted in Paris in 1903–04. The standing woman reflected in the mirror is Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, Vallotton's wife and the daughter of the noted art-dealer Bernheim, who often posed for the artist. The interior in the painting was probably located on the Rue Belles-Feuilles where the Vallottons moved in 1903.

The series of interiors of the artist's Parisian apartment was conceived as a latter-day version of the creations of de Hooch or Janssens. The painter's irony, however, acted as a bar to the warmth that is so much a part of the work of the 17th-century Dutch masters. Behind the exaggerated cataloguing of objects, an almost-judicial inventory of early-20th-century domestic life, one can divine a melancholy prepared to spill over into fatalistic indifference.