The Home Beautiful: A Chippendale Mirror, 1762-5

Chippendale Mirror and Girandole, 1762-5
The Victoria & Albert Museum

This exceptional Eighteenth Century mirror was designed to serve double-duty as a girandole or a sconce with three arms to support candles and reflect the candlelight to increase the light in a room.

A work of Chippendale (1718-1779), dating between 1762 and 1765, this mirror boasts an elaborately-carved Rococo frame adorned with flowers, leaves, bull-rushes and birds (probably cranes). The carved pine frame was gilded creating a surface which, when combined with the brass fittings and mirror, also served to reflect light.

Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) engaged a team of engravers to prepare his designs, so its difficult to say whose specific hand created this piece.  The glass—as with most large sheets of glass at the time—was most surely imported from France.  This complex design incorporates both smaller and larger sections of glass. The smaller sections were crafted from off-cuts from the larger pieces—economically utilizing as much of this expensive material as possible.