A Look into the Reflecting Mirror

DD sends me a 19th century etched and blown-glass dressing table mirror, angled upon an easel back. She asks about the history of “self-reflection” – and its value.

A mirror was treasured in the Golden Age of Greece. Socrates instructed his students to gaze at themselves. Diogenes quotes the great philosopher as saying: “If ugly, become learned to overcome this limitation. If beautiful, become humble to be worthy of your beauty. Avoid pride and use the likeness you see as a tool for self-improvement, beautiful or ugly as you may be.”

Another philosopher, over 2,000 years later, Charles Horton Cooley, developed his theory of the “looking-glass self.” He believed mirrors help us form an identity because we become, in part, what we believe others see. Some 50 years later, Dr. Seuss intuited the name “Horton” in Horton Hears a Who!, where Horton the elephant asks, in effect: “Am I an elephant, or am I a speck of dust?”

DD’s two-foot-tall mirror harkens back to the image of a fine lady seated at her dressing table, preparing for the day attended by her maid. She needed only a mirror large enough to reflect her face and décolletage while her hair was dressed and jewels fastened. In its day – the second quarter of the nineteenth century – mirrors were not mounted on bathroom walls over the sink. In my view, that twentieth-century innovation was a design mistake; count the earrings I have lost down the drain. I’d much rather have a dressing table and DD’s mirror.

Before 1835, mirrors were manufactured using the extraordinarily toxic element mercury. A sheet of rolled glass was backed with tin foil, fused with mercury to create a reflective surface. The fumes claimed the lives of workers in Murano as the Venetian mirror was perfected. Venetian mirror and glass guilds swore their members to secrecy, and because the process was so dangerous and expensive, Venetian mirrors were affordable only to noblemen and kings furnishing great “palaces of power,” such as Versailles. Mercury-backed mirrors also lacked longevity; over time they became cloudy as the mercury slowly settled downward with gravity.

Long before Venetian mercury mirrors were invented, humankind had already discovered ways to see itself. The earliest evidence of a reflector was simply a polished basin filled with shallow water around 6000 BCE. Succeeding generations experimented with polished volcanic glass, burnished brass, and copper until the ancient world discovered methods of backing glass with reflective metals.

Mirror-making changed dramatically in 1835 when Justus von Liebig developed the process of depositing silver nitrate onto glass. DD’s vanity mirror belongs to this new era of mirror making.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Historic New England restored a remarkable mirror for its exhibition, Myth and Memory: Stories of the American Revolution, at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts. Mirrors larger than two feet were exceptional luxuries, fashioned from hand-rolled, rippling glass. Nearly four feet tall and imported for the owner through London, it prompts an intriguing question: How did such a large, delicate, glass-framed mirror arrive in America before 1776? What kind of wealth did its owner possess? And what kind of vanity? In 1740, the journey from England to the American colonies typically took between six and eight weeks. However, depending on wind conditions, severe weather, or the ship’s route, transit times could easily stretch to 12 weeks or more.

The mirror belonged to a Loyalist colonist. When those who remained loyal to King George became enemies of the State after the Revolution, many fled to Canada or England. Their possessions were confiscated and auctioned at the site of today’s Boston City Hall. 

Thus DD’s vanity mirror, with beautifully blown-glass ornamentation, and delicately etched glass florets, was far more than a utilitarian dressing mirror. It was an intimate luxury, intended to have pride of place upon a fine dressing table. Today this style of mirror, considered fussy and small, is overlooked and underappreciated. Its silvered backing has naturally deteriorated with age, diminishing its reflectivity.

To the modern eye it appears little more than a battered old mirror in an era when even the restroom in the average airport concourse offers a flawless mirror stretching above every open-mouthed sink.

This mirror has a current fair market value of approximately $150. Ironically, adjusted for its rarity and cost of manufacture, it represented a far greater luxury in the mid-nineteenth century than its modest value would suggest today. Sometimes an antique’s greatest value lies not in its price, but in the remarkable story reflected back at us.