Lot Essay
This work is a later version of Somov's 'The Mirror' painted in 1927 for the collector M. V. Braikevich and now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Of the composition, Somov wrote: 'I am busy now as I am working with pleasure on a miniature: an eighteenth-century lady looking into a mirror - everyone wants eighteeth-century things from me. In the mirror you can see the lady en trois quarts and the same lady in the foreground en profile perdu and a bit contre jour.' (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Somov archive, fond 136)