page_title: Femme au miroir
section_title: Mirrors in art
hierarchical_section_title: Femme au miroir / Mirrors in art
caption_attribution_description: English: Red-figure lekythos. Woman holding a mirror. Athens 470-460 BC. NG Prague, on loan from the National Museum in Prague, H10 774.Čeština: Červenofigurový lekythos. Žena držící zrcadlo. Athény, 470 až 460 před n. l. NG Praha, zapůjčeno Národním Muzeem v Praze, H10 774.
context_page_description: Femme au miroir, Femme à sa toilette or Lady at her Dressing Table, is a painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. This distilled synthetic form of Cubism exemplifies Metzinger's continued interest, in 1916, towards less surface activity, with a strong emphasis on larger, flatter, overlapping abstract planes. The manifest primacy of the underlying geometric configuration, rooted in the abstract, controls nearly every element of the composition. The role of color remains primordial, but is now restrained within sharp delineated boundaries in comparison with several earlier works. The work of Juan Gris from the summer of 1916 to late 1918 bears much in common with that of Metzinger's late 1915 – early 1916 paintings.
  Painted during the spring of 1916, Femme au miroir formed part of the collection of Léonce Rosenberg, and was probably exhibited at Galerie de L'Effort Moderne in Paris. In 1918, the painting was shipped to New York City for the occasion of the Léonce Rosenberg collection auction. For the same occasion, Femme au miroir was reproduced in The Sun, New York, Sunday 28 April 1918.
context_section_description: References to mirrors have been dated from 6200 to 4500 BCE. The earliest metal mirrors found in Mesopotamia are dated circa 4,000 BCE. Though archeologists discovered what are considered the first man-made mirrors in the burials of the Badari culture (5,000 – 4,500 BCE).
  The theme of depicting mirrors in art dates back to at least the art of ancient Egypt (e.g., Queen Kawit at her toilet, a relief found in a sarcophagus at Deir el-Bahri temple complex) in passing through the classical period of ancient Greece.
  The mirror is the central device in a wide variety of European paintings:
  Titian's Venus with a Mirror
  Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait
  Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
  Pablo Picasso's Girl before a Mirror (1932)
  Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, wherein the viewer is both the watcher (of a self-portrait in progress) and the watched, and the many adaptations of that painting in various media
  Veronese's Venus with a Mirror
  Mirrors have been used by artists to create works and hone their craft:
  Filippo Brunelleschi discovered linear perspective with the help of the mirror.
  Leonardo da Vinci called the mirror the "master of painters". He recommended, "When you wish to see whether your whole picture accords with what you have portrayed from nature take a mirror and reflect the actual object in it. Compare what is reflected with your painting and carefully consider whether both likenesses of the subject correspond, particularly in regard to the mirror."
  Many self-portraits are made possible through the use of mirrors:
  Mirrors were used by Dürer, Frida Kahlo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and others, to make self-portraits.
  M. C. Escher used special shapes of mirrors in order to achieve a much more complete view of his surroundings than by direct observation in Hand with Reflecting Sphere (also known as Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror).
caption: Red-figure lekythos. Woman holding a mirror. Athens 470-460 BC. NG Prague, on loan from the National Museum in Prague, H10 774
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