Gustav Jagerspacher was a regular at the writer Peter Altenberg's café table in Vienna. He produced a number of caricatures of the famed 'Fool of Vienna', which Altenberg often inscribed, collected and displayed in his own rooms. Altenberg was a known night-owl and neurasthenic, hard-drinking, caffeine-stimulated and nervously agitated. Jagerspacher depicts him scurrying across the city at night, framed by a poster advertising the Apollo variety theatre on the Gumpendorferstrasse. Despite this poster, the portrait was destined for Adolf Loos's tiny bar off the Kärtnerstrasse, which opened in 1908.

Inscribed recto in pen and black ink at bottom edge of secondary support: "Are we not all only caricatures from the truly and ideal wishes, which God and Nature made with our souls and our bodies?!?"