Antique Renaissance Revival Walnut Pediment Mirror, c. 1870–1885

The Piece

A large architectural wall mirror in walnut, fifty eight inches high by forty one wide, built as a piece of classical facade rather than as a frame. It is composed the way a building front is composed, from the ground up. A plain base rail carries a single applied disc at its centre. From it rise two pilasters, each faced with a flat shaped panel outlined by a routed bead, and each capped by a block of tight vertical reeding standing in for a capital. Across the top runs a full entablature with a projecting cornice, and beneath that cornice a course of dentils, twenty odd small square blocks marching the width of the piece.

Above the cornice the pediment breaks open. Two raked triangular sections rise toward the centre and stop short, and into the gap between them is set a rectangular plinth with its own moulded cap, the arrangement a Roman architect would recognise and a Victorian cabinetmaker used because it reads as authority from across a room. Each raked section holds a recessed triangular panel. Flanking the whole at the lower corners are shaped drops terminating in tight carved volutes, and applied to the crest is a shield shaped ornament cut with a deep double routed outline.

The mirror plate is present and shows the mottling and edge loss of long exposure. The surface of the walnut is dry throughout, the old finish largely gone, and the timber reads warm brown with the grain raised and open.

History & Provenance

The style is Renaissance Revival, and it is worth being precise about that, because these are frequently offered as earlier than they are. American taste in the 1850s ran to Rococo Revival: serpentine curves, naturalistic carved fruit and flowers, cabriole forms, nothing straight if it could be made to bend. This mirror has none of that. It is rectilinear, symmetrical and architectural, and it borrows its whole vocabulary from classical building: pediment, entablature, dentils, pilasters, capitals. That is the Renaissance Revival manner, which took hold in America in the middle 1860s, dominated through the 1870s, and gave way to Eastlake and then to Colonial Revival by the later 1880s.

The making supports it. The applied ornaments are flat shaped panels with routed outlines rather than carved relief, which is the signature economy of the 1870s, when machine routing let a factory apply decoration a carver would have taken hours over. The dentil course is a milled strip. The mouldings are run rather than worked by hand.

One note offered plainly rather than buried. A nail visible at the back of the mirror backing is a round shanked wire nail with a disc head. Wire nails entered American production around 1875 and displaced cut nails through the 1880s and 1890s. That nail sits in a backing strip, which is the component on a mirror most likely to have been replaced at some point in a hundred and fifty years, so it may well date a repair rather than the frame. It is recorded here because a buyer should have it, and because the style already places the piece in the same window rather than earlier.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Scale is the argument. At nearly five feet tall and better than three wide this is not a mirror you hang among other things, it is the thing the wall is arranged around, over a mantel, at the head of a stair, or leaned against a wall in a room with the height to take it. The dry unrestored walnut is the other argument. Against plaster or a dark paint it reads as salvaged architecture rather than as furniture, which is a harder and more interesting look than a polished frame, and one that a great many people now pay a restorer to fake. This one has not been faked and has not been touched.