© Danielle James/The Flint Journal, via Associated Press
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.
These days, mirror play is something you do with babies and infants, but over the last six centuries or so it has also been a feature of many paintings. It all started in the Northern Renaissance, when leading Flemish painters including the van Eycks became fascinated in depicting optical phenomena including reflections in mirrors.
Jan van Eyck’s most famous painting, known as The Arnolfini Wedding (or similar variations), is a remarkable exploration of optics, featuring distorted reflections in the mirror near the centre of the painting, completed in 1434. Between this newly-wed couple holding hands next to their marital bed, in the midline of the painting, is a prominent circular convex mirror. Its reflection shows a view of the room looking in the opposite direction, past the couple to another two figures, who could be the artist and another, as shown in the detail below.
Just over a century later, in about 1545, in Venice, Tintoretto painted Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan. In this unusual interpretation, Vulcan is inspecting his wife, as Mars cowers under the bed at the right. A small dog is drawing attention to Mars’ hiding place, and Venus’ child, Cupid, rests in a cradle behind them. The circular mirror behind the bed reflects an image of Vulcan leaning over Venus, seen in the detail below.
For the pioneering still life painter Clara Peeters in the early years of the seventeenth century, reflections showed her self-portrait.
In her still life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honour (1612) reflections in the gold cup at the right show her in the act of painting, as seen more clearly in the detail below.
In the middle of that century Diego Velázquez reversed the play in using a reflection to show the subjects of his painting, alongside his self-portrait.
Velázquez’ Las Meninas, translated as The Maids of Honour, from about 1656-57 is a well-known example of a group portrait with mirror play. In what is overtly a depiction of eleven people and a dog in a room in the Alcázar Palace, he uses composition and gaze to tell us more. Much depends on what we believe most of the figures are looking at. Reflected in the rectangular plane mirror on the far wall are King Philip IV and his wife Queen Mariana of Austria, shown in the detail below.
There has been dispute over whether the reflection shows the royal couple stood where the viewer is, or the mirror is reflecting their painted images on Velázquez’s canvas. How their images were generated is probably of secondary importance, as either way the gaze of most of the other figures is clearly directed not at the viewer, but at the King and Queen, who may be getting up to leave after sitting for Velázquez to paint them. In this reading, the most important people not in the painting only appear in reflection and the gaze of others.
Mirror play continued in a few more paintings up to the late nineteenth century.
Domenicus van Wijnen’s Witches’ Sabbath by Moonlight is set in a moonlit Italian landscape. This combines many of the now-classical symbols associated with ‘the dark arts’, and is taking place at an outdoor altar set up at the foot of the gallows, on which a dead body hangs. In front of the altar at the right is a soldier in armour, who is looking in a mirror at the image of another.
In about 1871, Alfred Stevens introduced a large mirror into The Psyché (My Studio). The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche. For this painting, Stevens doesn’t actually use a proper psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, perhaps to suggest that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, breaking up her form in an unnatural way.
In the late nineteenth century mirror play became more popular, particularly in the paintings of Pierre Bonnard.
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