Large Empire Style Full-Length Bronze and Brass Psyché Mirror — French Work, Circa 1880

This magnificent full-length psyché mirror — one hundred and eighty centimetres in height and nearly seventy centimetres in width — is an imposing example of the Empire Revival style as it was practised by the finest French workshops of the late nineteenth century. The large oval mirror plate is contained within a delicate gilt brass frame and mounted on a tilting pivot between two slender uprights of exceptional decorative richness, their bronze and brass shafts adorned with classical ornamental mounts in the full vocabulary of First Empire furniture-making: chains, arrows, foliate mounts, and turned elements that speak of a period when decorative objects were conceived as vehicles for an elevated programme of classical and military symbolism. The whole rests on a splayed base of equal refinement.

The First Empire style, associated with the reign of Napoleon I (1804–1815) and the vocabulary developed by its great designers Percier and Fontaine, exercised a lasting influence on French decorative arts throughout the nineteenth century. The psyché — a form perfected in the Empire period — was repeatedly revisited by later craftsmen seeking to capture the combination of imperial grandeur and practical domestic elegance that distinguished it. The circa 1880 dating places this piece in the Third Republic era, when a nostalgic return to the grandeur of the First Empire was fully fashionable among the Parisian upper bourgeoisie and the new industrial aristocracy.

The mirror presents in fine condition, the bronze and brass mounts retaining their warm patina and the mirror plate clear and undimmed. A piece of this scale, material quality, and historical interest occupies a distinguished place in the spectrum of French nineteenth-century decorative arts — equally at home in a period-furnished salon and in a contemporary interior where its historical weight would provide a compelling counterpoint to modern furnishings.