Even before Goethe’s play Faust was brought to the stage, it was realized in images. This often happened in the form of printed illustration cycles and often by artists of the Romantic era. Also the small depiction of Gretchen, who finds the precious box of jewellery in her simple parlour, belongs to a series of images to Goethe’s Faust. At the time the image was made, the artist Riepenhausen, a member of the Nazarene group of artists, was living in Rome.