The Mirror

The Mirror, painted in 1901 and held by Aberdeen Archives, Gallery and Museums, belongs to a well-established tradition of paintings depicting women at their mirrors — a subject running from Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait through Velázquez's Rokeby Venus to Degas's intimate boudoir scenes. The mirror introduced several formal complications and pleasures simultaneously: the doubling of the figure (both facing away and reflected), the reflective surface as a painting within a painting, and the implied self-awareness of a woman who both looks and is looked at. Steer's British Impressionist approach treated the mirror subject with particular interest in the light conditions it created — the bright reflected surface as a light source competing with the ambient room light. The Aberdeen holding reflects that gallery's active collection building of Scottish-relevant and British art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The mirror introduced a doubled figure that required Steer to render the same person from two angles simultaneously — typically the back of the head and shoulders, and the reflected face. The reflected image required slightly altered colour temperature (cooler, since mirror surfaces absorb some warmth) and reduced value intensity. The mirror's bright surface itself required the most careful tonal calibration in the composition.