Vintage House of Heydenryk Octagonal Margin Mirror, c. 1936–1960

The Piece

A large octagonal wall mirror by the House of Heydenryk of New York, gilt over a moulded frame, built as a central bevelled plate inside a full border of separate bevelled margin plates with gilt beading dividing one from the next. It stands twenty-eight and three quarter inches wide by forty-one high and it has the weight in the hand that this kind of construction should have.

The beading is the character of it. Every gilt member is worked as a continuous run of rounded knuckles, and the pattern travels around the outer edge, around the inner opening, and along every division between the margin plates. Three concentric runs of it, so the gold reads as a series of bright ribs holding the glass rather than as a solid frame.

The margin plates are individually bevelled and catch light independently of the centre, which is the whole reason for building a mirror this way. A single sheet of glass gives you back a room. This one breaks the room into panels and returns light from nine different angles at once.

The gilding is warm and slightly green in tone, worn through to the ground at the outer corners and along the high points of the beading where hands and walls have touched it over the years.

History & Provenance

The frame carries the Heydenryk mark, and that is a name worth knowing.

The family firm began as Heijdenrijk in Amsterdam in 1805, which makes it one of the oldest framemaking houses in the world. Henry Heydenryk Jr., born 1905, was the fourth generation, and in 1936 he brought the business to New York and built it into The House of Heydenryk Jr. Inc., producing original designs rather than period reproductions. What came out of that shop framed work for Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, John Marin, Robert Motherwell, Picasso and Dalí, and for the photographers Richard Avedon and Yousuf Karsh. Nearly every major American museum used the firm, and in the 1970s Heydenryk became official frame consultant to the National Gallery of Art. Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo were customers. Heydenryk wrote The Art and History of Frames in 1963, the first mainstream reference on the subject, and died in 1994.

The New York arrival in 1936 sets the floor. Nothing carrying this mark from the American shop predates it.

The form places it in the earlier part of that run. Octagonal mirrors built with bevelled margin plates were a signature of the 1920s and 1930s, when plate glass had become cheap enough to use decoratively and the fashion was for reflective surfaces broken into geometry. Heydenryk arrived in New York directly into that moment and into a clientele who wanted it done properly rather than stamped out.

The construction is traditional throughout. There is no sealed backing board. The glass sits directly in the rebate held by small wood turn blocks bearing on it, so what shows from behind is the reddish-brown factory backing paint over the silvering itself. The screws in those blocks and the stamped steel D-ring hangers are later replacements, ordinary on a mirror that has been rehung more than once across ninety years. The margin plates carry genuine desilvering, the dark speckled patches that appear where silvering oxidises inward from the cut edges of the glass, and that is the work of decades rather than anything applied.

It is offered as c. 1936 to 1960.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

At forty-one inches this is a mirror that anchors a wall rather than decorating one. Over a console, a mantel or a sideboard it does the work a large picture would, and it gives light back instead of absorbing it, which is why mirrors this size end up opposite windows in almost every room that has one.

The margin plates are the reason to choose it over a plain mirror the same size. Broken into panels, the reflection stops being a second room and becomes a pattern of light, softer and less literal, and the desilvering in the border gives a depth new glass cannot imitate.

And then there is the name on it. Heydenryk frames hang in the Metropolitan and the National Gallery, and around pictures by Hopper and O'Keeffe. Very little of what that shop made was a mirror, and fewer still at this scale, which is what separates this from every other gilt octagonal mirror on the market.