Neoclassical Style Full-Length Brass Psyché Mirror — French Work, Circa 1940

This stately full-length psyché mirror draws its vocabulary directly from the great tradition of French Empire and Directoire furniture, reinterpreted here in polished brass with an authority entirely suited to the refined taste of the 1940s. The tall arched mirror plate — mounted on a central tilting pivot that allows the angle of reflection to be adjusted freely — is held between two slender uprights terminating in decorative finials, the whole raised on an elegantly splayed base whose classical proportions recall the finest cabinetmaker's work of the post-Revolutionary period. A practical refinement distinguishes this piece: the mirror plate is removable from its stand, a feature that facilitates transport and installation without compromising the integrity of the design.

The neoclassical psyché in brass occupies a specific and distinguished chapter in the history of French decorative arts. While the form had been an essential domestic object since the early nineteenth century — when the growing bourgeoisie demanded practical furniture of elegance equal to the aristocratic interior — its translation into brass in the inter-war and immediate post-war period gave it a new material presence that suited both the Modernist love of honest metal and the continuing appetite for historically inflected domestic elegance. The warmth of polished brass, its resistance to tarnish, and the clarity of its decorative hardware all recommended it as an ideal material for the revival of classical forms.

At one hundred and fifty-three centimetres in height and fifty centimetres in width, the mirror offers a full-length reflection of generous proportions. The brass is warm and polished throughout, and the mirror plate is clear and undamaged. A mirror of considerable pedigree and presence, equally at home in a classically furnished interior and in a more eclectic contemporary setting where the quality of its form and material will speak for themselves.