CIRCA 1755

This flower-festooned pier glass is conceived in the George II 'Modern' or 'Pittoresque' fashion popularised in the 1750s and disseminated through the publication of the St. Martin's Lane cabinet-maker Thomas Chippendale's Director in 1754 (1st edition). The design for this mirror, with its central oval plate surrounded by border plates framed by C-scrolls wrapped with foliage and garlands and the angles capped with urns, relates to Chippendale's design for a 'Pier Glass Frame' published in the first edition of the Director, pl. CXLVI. This design almost certainly inspired the magnificent pair of white-painted (and later gilded) pier glasses Chippendale supplied to William Crichton-Dalrymple, 5th Earl of Dumfries, for Dumfries House, Ayrshire in 1759; though in the Dumfries commission Chippendale left the borders empty of glass and inserted a bust of a Chinese gentleman into the cresting, where previously he had drawn two children playing with a bird. An identical mirror, with minor variations to the carving of the flower-filled basket cresting and the urns, was sold anonymously, at Phillips, London, 16 June 1992, lot 90.

THE GILDING
An analysis of the gilding has revealed that the decoration visible today is the original gesso and water-gilding, with some fairly recent patched repairs to the water-gilding. Samples taken from the edges of the mirror reveal splashes of several layers of 19th-century house paint over a thick layer of dirt covering the gilding, which probably indicate that when the unknown house that this mirror previously occupied was re-decorated, the mirror itself remained on the wall.