Erich Heckel held regular reading evenings following his move to Berlin in 1912. Depicted here are Dr Walter Kaesbach from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin who served with Heckel at the Western Front, and the dancer Siddi Rhia whom Heckel married in 1915. The halo-like illumination around the heads of the figures lends an intense, quasi-religious mood to the occasion. The artist also developed this important theme in a painting of the same year (Vogt 1914/4) and in a watercolour of 1913-14 now in the Brücke Museum in Berlin (cf. Brücke-Archiv 5, 1971, plate 5)