Jan van Eyck’s famous double-portrait of the Arnolfini Wedding (1434) introduced mirror-play, but didn’t quite demonstrate its use to extend the scene depicted because of the small size of its reflected image. Surprisingly it appears that four centuries were to pass before reflections became more widely adopted for this purpose, although I’m sure they had already been used for it in interior decoration.

One of the earliest of my examples refers back to the Arnolfini Wedding in its use of a circular and non-planar mirror.

The dates and background to Ford Madox Brown’s unfinished painting Take your Son, Sir! remain unclear. It’s thought that Brown started work on this in 1851, although it shows his second wife Emma with their newborn son. Their first son, Oliver, wasn’t born until 1855, and their second, Arthur, in September 1856, suggesting that he didn’t start this until at least 1855. It’s generally held that this shows not Oliver, who lived until 1874, but Arthur, who died aged ten months in July 1857, at which time Brown abandoned the painting. The detail seen reflected in the mirror is of a contemporary living room and a man, presumably a self-portrait.

A few years before that, William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, painted over the period 1851-53, employs the reflection seen in a much larger mirror to add substantial detail to its unresolved narrative. This places the scene in a small if not cramped house in the leafy suburbs of London, in reality Saint John’s Wood, where this couple are clearly in an extra-marital relationship.

Rebecca Solomon’s Appointment (1861) is another early problem picture, with a deliberately open-ended narrative set in an interior. A beautiful woman stands in front of a mirror, and looks intently at a man, who is only seen in his reflection in the mirror, and stands in a doorway behind the viewer’s right shoulder. The woman is dressed to go out, and is holding a letter in her gloved hands.

In 1872 Alfred Stevens’ The Japanese Parisian filled its canvas with the reflection of the face of his model framed by floating flowers, which must be behind the viewer.

Soon after William Holman Hunt had completed his Awakening Conscience above, he started work on another painting using a smaller circular mirror to extend the scene and its reading, Dolce Far Niente, which may have been started as early as 1859 but wasn’t completed until 1875. The reflection in the mirror above the woman’s head shows this to be a domestic scene, with another figure leaning over a large wooden bureau or a dressing-table, perhaps.

So far, these examples have all appeared to conform to optical principles. It was Édouard Manet who challenged those.

His Bar at the Folies-Bergère from 1882 poses the problem of resolving the optically impossible, no matter how you try to read it. This forlorn young woman is serving at the bar in front of her, with what is presumed to be a large mirror behind showing a reflection that doesn’t match its original. Arranged on the bar are assorted bottles of beers and spirits, that on the far left bearing the artist’s signature. According to the reflection, the audience at the Folies-Bergère are watching the show under the light of a huge chandelier.

John William Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus from 1891 develops the circular mirror of the Arnolfini Wedding into a key narrative device. Circe sits on her throne, holding up a krater for Ulysses to drink, with her wand in the other hand. The viewer is Ulysses, seen preparing to draw his sword in the large mirror behind the sorceress. On the left side of the mirror is his ship.

In the closing years of his career, Waterhouse returned with an even larger mirror at the centre of his story.

His “I am Half Sick of Shadows” said the Lady of Shalott (1915) is the third and last of his paintings based on the poem The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), published in 1833 and 1842. This recounts part of the Arthurian legends, the tragedy of Elaine of Astolat, as retold in an Italian novella from the 1200s from which it draws its title.

The Lady of Shalott lives in a castle connected to Camelot by a river. She’s subject to a mysterious curse confining her to weaving images on her loom, and mustn’t look directly at the outside world, although she can view it using a mirror. Tennyson calls these reflected images ‘shadows of the world’, and this painting depicts the stanza from the poem:

But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often thro’ the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights,
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said
The Lady of Shalott.

The circular image behind her isn’t a window, but a mirror revealing Camelot with its winding river. Although this includes her loom, the castle can’t be real, but one of “the mirror’s magic sights”.

My last example, painted just before the Second World War by Paul Nash, extends this deeper into the unconscious.

Landscape from a Dream (1936-38) was inspired by Freud’s theories of the significance of dreams as reflections of the unconscious. Nash locates this collection of incongruous objects on the Dorset coast, a landscape he associated with the praeternatural. Dominating the scene is a large framed planar mirror, almost parallel with the picture plane.

Stood at the right end of the mirror is a hawk staring at its own reflection, which Nash explained is a symbol of the material world. To the left, the mirror reflects several floating spheres, referring to the soul. The reflection shows that behind the viewer is a red sun setting in a red sky, with another hawk flying high, away from the scene. To the right of the hawk is a five-panelled screen made of glass, through which the coastal landscape can be seen: it’s a screen which doesn’t screen.

On 11 February 1862, Lizzie, wife of the leading Pre-Raphaelite artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, died of an overdose of laudanum (tincture of opium) at the age of only 32. A couple of years later, Rossetti embarked on an unusual post-mortem portrait of her in the role of Dante’s beloved Beatrice. Although Dante never revealed her true identity, many have believed her to represent Beatrice di Folco Portinari, who had died even younger almost six hundred years earlier, at the age of only 25. Beata Beatrix is one of Rossetti’s major paintings.

The strangest thing about Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (c 1864–70) is that it represents a woman who, beyond Dante’s writing, is almost unknown, yet she’s become one of the most painted women in history. This weekend’s two articles look at some of the better-known paintings of Beatrice, from before Rossetti’s image, and afterwards, spanning some of Europe’s most visionary artists, from William Blake to Odilon Redon.

Dante wrote about Beatrice in two of his most popular works: his youthful Vita Nuova, and in two of the three books in his Divine Comedy. Early commentators don’t appear to have made any association between his literary figure and a real person, let alone a married woman who, at best, only met Dante twice before her early death. Many scholars believe Dante’s figure is symbolic rather than physical, which is more likely in her role in the Divine Comedy. Nevertheless, she has proved a popular subject, particularly during the nineteenth century.

The American Romantic artist and poet Washington Allston shows her in a straightforward portrait of Beatrice from 1819. He makes no literary allusions, although this is most likely to refer to Vita Nuova.

It was William Blake’s paintings for his unfinished illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy that started to explore her in the context of Dante’s narrative.

Beatrice on the Car, from 1824-27, shows her appearing in a chariot or ‘car’ in the midst of a religious procession, which takes place in the earthly paradise on the summit of the island-mountain of Purgatory.

Blake’s best-developed painting of her, Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, from the same few years prior to his death, shows her admonishing Dante for his recent straying from the path of righteousness. This is rich with symbols and graphic devices, such as its vortex of heads and eyes, and the marvellous gryphon pulling Beatrice’s chariot.

Dante’s works enjoyed a revival during the nineteenth century, bringing other artists to use them as themes for their paintings, with the Divine Comedy the more common.

Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Oesterley’s conventional and Romantic view of Beatrice and her chariot follows Dante’s description literally, even down to the colours of her clothing.

Andrea Pierini’s curiously antiquated version from 1853 is also literal in its detail.

William Dyce returned to portraiture style for his painting of Beatrice in 1859, when Rossetti was peaking in his obsession with her. Dyce had considerable exposure to paintings of the Divine Comedy: when he was in Rome in 1827-28, he is thought to have been friends with Friedrich Overbeck, the Nazarene artist who had just been painting frescoes of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered alongside others of the Divine Comedy, in the Casa Massimo. When he returned to London, Dyce was responsible for introducing the Pre-Raphaelites, including Rossetti, to the influential critic John Ruskin.

Others involved with the Pre-Raphaelites also adopted Beatrice as a theme. Simeon Solomon’s ink and watercolour painting of Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice (1859–63) is taken from Vita Nuova, and its description of the two nine year-olds meeting in about 1274.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti had started to become obsessed with his name-sake and Beatrice soon after his early success as a Pre-Raphaelite painter. In December 1849, he wrote a short story titled Hand and Soul which was published the following month in the first issue of the Germ, the movement’s magazine, edited by Rossetti’s brother William Michael.

His story tells of courtly love, artistic and religious fervour of an imaginary mediaeval painter in the Italian city of Arezzo, who is in a strictly Platonic relationship with “his mystical lady, now hardly in her ninth year”, the same age as Beatrice was when Dante claimed to have met her.

Shortly afterwards, Rossetti started sketching for a painting of their meeting in Purgatory.

In this figure sketch for The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Purgatory, made in 1852, Dante is on his knees as his beloved Beatrice admonishes him for straying from the path of righteousness.

Rossetti had second thoughts, and in 1853-54 painted this more conventional composition, showing Dante in full spate, and Beatrice flanked by angels carrying golden crosses. His details are at odds with Dante’s account, though.

At about the same time, Rossetti was working on a more narrative watercolour of another meeting between the two, this time based on the Vita Nuova, in Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies Him Her Salutation (1852). Dante, dressed in his traditional red, is here being ignored by his beloved, after they had bumped into one another at a wedding. This is thought to be Rossetti’s first painting in which Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Siddall is the model for Beatrice.

Lizzie was about 22 at that time. A working class woman, who initially worked at a milliner’s shop in London, she couldn’t have been further from the minor nobility and affluence of Beatrice Portinari. Neither was Lizzie noted for her beauty: she first modelled in around 1849 for Walter Deverell, who chose her for her plainness. Lizzie continued to model for Pre-Raphaelites, and in 1851-52 achieved fame as the model for John Everett Millais’ Ophelia.

Lizzie became an artist in her own right, although her paintings are now sadly neglected. In 1852, she moved in to live with Rossetti, but her health started to deteriorate, probably as a result of tuberculosis.

Rossetti then went on to a more fictionalised watercolour of The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1853), showing Dante being comforted as he is drawing an angel on that day of remembrance for his beloved. This is situated in central Florence according to the view through the window at the right, but there’s an incongruous country garden seen through the door at the left.

As Lizzie’s health declined, Rossetti created more ornate and icon-like paintings of Beatrice. The Salutation of Beatrice from 1859-63 uses oil and gold leaf on conifer wood, set in a frame Rossetti designed and painted himself. It brings together the literary Beatrice from Vita Nuova on the left, with the spiritual Beatrice from the Divine Comedy at the right, where they meet in earthly paradise atop Purgatory. On the frame are inscriptions taken from the respective works, and in the middle is the date and time (on a sundial) of Beatrice Portinari’s death in 1290.

When the couple married in Hastings in 1860, she had to be carried around the corner to attend the church. She became depressed, and was addicted to laudanum (tincture of opium). In 1861, she had a stillborn daughter, and later that year became pregnant a second time. She died on 11 February 1862, as a result of what was almost certainly a deliberate overdose of laudanum.