Ernst Fritsch was one of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists working in Berlin between 1919 and 1932. He exhibited with the Jury-Free Art Show and the November Gruppe during the 1920s. Amy Schlegel discusses his painterly style in the exhibition catalogue Art in Germany 1909-1936, From Expressionism to Resistance, The Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Munich, 1990, p. 177), "Fritch employs the rationalisation of Neue Sachlichkeit, its cold empiricism and denial of personal contact, in an effort to lend portraiture the apparent objectivity of scientific observation. Stylistically and ideologically, however, he does not approach the harsh verism of such painters as Otto Dix or Christian Schad. Eschewing their detailed precision and their emphasis on the accidentals of surroundings, Fritsch betrays, instead, his own prior attachment to naïve art in the simplified, airless setting with its isolated structures". Schlegel also draws attention to Fritsch's use of a palette that derived from the precedents of Robert Delaunay and Marc Chagall.

The artist's widow identified the subject as the artist's son, Paul.