In a brief Facebook exchange with colleague and now design journalist Kendra Boutell, it occurred to me, times being the way they are, that we have an unusually large stock of some items, most notably mirrors. Some time back, I had written a brief squib about period mirrors for my friend Heidi Gerpheide for California Homes. Still and all, my own fascination with mirrors remains unabated.
The three century survival of something as fragile as a giltframed mirror with its glass plate is worthy of wonder, but in our own age of mass production, the miracle of technology that allowed its production in the first place is lost in the mists of time. The now glaucous plates with their reflective surfaces achieved with an amalgam of silver and mercury were about the most precious thing then going- not the least element of which was the mercury poisoning that afflicted anyone involved in mirror production.
The ubiquitous gilt frame, often now the most prized portion of the mirror itself, was largely the result of a period notion of typology. With the mirror plate itself so precious, one naturally had to pair it with a framework that was equally so.
And as striking. With the ability to shape and grind glass resulting in the introduction of convex mirrors in the early 19th century, the typical placement of the convex mirror above the mantelpiece in the sitting room gave an inordinate prominence to an object already astonishingly striking. Interestingly, these mirrors were always placed rather high up on the wall- their function was less to peer into, than to allow reflection of the entire room in the convex surface of the mirror plate.
See an album of our mirrors on our Facebook page.