Richard Riemerschmid was one of the most influential designers in Europe in the first three decades of the 20th century. He first made designs for furniture in 1895, working in the style that came to be known as Art Nouveau. He became a leading member of the Munich Vereinigte Werkstätten (United Workshops), founded in 1898.

This dressing table was made by the workshops in the following year as part of a scheme of furnishings made for a newly married couple. The dressing table incorporates a full-length mirror of the kind that was often supplied as a separate piece of furniture in a bedroom suite. This interest in functionalism in design is an aspect of Riemerschmid's work that accounts for his later importance in the development of Modernism. The choice of light-coloured ash, with some elements showing the lively grain of burr ash, gives a decorative surface to a piece that is otherwise deliberately simple in its form, relying on proportion and elegant line for its success as a design.