Art Deco Gilt-Metal Hand Mirror, Graduated Green and Cream Enamelled Back with Gold Pinstriping, Stepped Fan Palmette and Reeded Handle, Bevelled Plate, c. 1925–1940

The Piece

A hand mirror in gilt metal, rectangular with canted corners, and decorated on the back rather than the front.

The plate is bevelled — a wide ground-and-polished chamfer running the whole way round, which catches the light as a bright line inside the frame.

The frame itself is narrow and carries a finely chased leaf-and-dart band along its face, unbroken round all four sides.

At the join, the frame drops into a stepped fan palmette: three tiers of shoulder narrowing down to a small fluted fan, and below it a long tapering handle reeded in parallel lines, rounded at the end.

The back is the decorated face. A cream field runs down the centre between two bands of green shaded from deep jade to pale, each separated from the cream by a fine gold pinstripe. The shading is graduated rather than flat — sprayed, not brushed.

At the centre of the cream field sits a small green oval plate pierced with two slots, fixed through the panel by four bent prongs.

History & Provenance

This is the surviving third of a dresser set. A basic set was three pieces — brush, comb and hand mirror — and an elaborate one added manicure tools, a perfume atomizer, a powder box, a lipstick case, a button hook and a shoe horn, all matched, all sold together.

The mirror is the piece that survives, and there is a mechanical reason. A brush loses its bristles. A comb loses teeth. A mirror has no wearing part at all — nothing on it is consumed by use — so a century later the mirrors turn up constantly and complete sets almost never do.

The 1920s and 30s were the high point of the whole category, the period of greatest variety and quality in vanity-set design. The best sets committed to a single material throughout — brass, enamel, silver or Bakelite — rather than mixing, and they were bought as wedding and graduation gifts and handed down.

Then the dressing table disappeared and took the category with it. Through the 1950s and 60s makers moved to plastic and simpler designs as vanity tables became obsolete: grooming shifted to the bathroom, to a fixed mirror over a basin, and a mirror you hold in your hand stopped being something anyone used every morning. What had been a daily object became an ornament, which is what this one is now.

The fan is the period signature. Stepped shoulders narrowing to a small fluted fan is the Art Deco motif, and it is the same shape scaled up and down across the decade — a cinema proscenium, a radiator grille, the setback of a skyscraper. On a mirror it does structural work too, spreading the load from a narrow handle into a wide frame.

The bevel is a separate operation and a mark of quality. Grinding and polishing a chamfer round four sides of a plate, then silvering it without spoiling that edge, costs real work on a piece of glass that would function identically flat. It exists for one reason: the line of light it makes at the border.

The green is airbrushed, and that is a date in itself. The shading from deep to pale in a single band cannot be done with a brush; it is sprayed. The airbrush was the decorator's tool of the Deco decades, and the graduated band it produced shows up everywhere in the period — on radios, on tins, on cocktail glasses, on this.

The mirror carries no maker's mark, stamp or label anywhere and is offered unattributed. Dated on the stepped fan palmette, the reeded tapering handle, the airbrushed graduated enamel with gold pinstriping, and the bevelled plate: c. 1925–1940.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A hand mirror is one of the very few antiques that lies flat and reads as a picture.

Set it face up on a dressing table, a console, a bathroom shelf or a stack of books and it stops being a grooming tool and becomes a small bright rectangle in a room that did not have one. It takes whatever is above it — a ceiling rose, a lamp, a window — and the bevel throws a hard line of light round the edge that a flat plate cannot produce.

It is also the best tray in the house for small things. Rings and earrings at a bedside, cufflinks on a dresser, a watch by a sink. Anything you put on it appears twice, which is why florists and stylists stand candles and small vases on mirrors and have done for two hundred years.

The shape carries at a distance. The stepped fan and the reeded handle read as Art Deco from across a room, before any detail is legible, and gilt metal against dark wood or a painted surface is one of the easiest contrasts there is.

Hung by the handle on a picture hook, alone or in a group of three, it works as wall decoration and gives back a bit of light to a dim hallway.

And it still does the job it was made for. The plate is clear and undistorted; if you want a mirror to check the back of your own head against a bathroom glass, this is a better-looking one than anything sold new.

A note on care, and the first rule is the one that caused the damage already on it. Never put anything wet on the back, and never clean it with solvent. The rings across the cream panel were made by a bottle standing on enamel, and ammonia, acetone and alcohol will lift what is left of that finish immediately. Dust the reverse with a soft dry cloth and stop there.

Clean the glass by spraying the cloth, never the mirror. Liquid run to the edge of an old plate wicks in behind the silvering and lifts it, and that black creeping edge cannot be reversed. Wipe inward from the border, not outward.

Do not attempt to touch in the flaked handle with paint; a fresh colour beside an aged airbrushed enamel is far more conspicuous than the loss it covers.

Store or display it flat, face up, or hang it — standing a hand mirror on its handle in a crock is how the glass eventually meets the floor.