Cheval mirror

While wandering through the palace afterwards, she stumbles upon a sculpture gallery of famous beauties whose good looks brought demise to their nations, like Helen of Troy and Armida of Damascus, and suddenly sees herself amidst them.

The subsequent verse, The Fair One, or in Tints or Sculpture, spies Her rapturous Face where'er she turns her Eyes: In Mirrours too, and in each chrystal Stream, Which as her Form's reflected brighter seem.

In 1787, a visitor to Paris recorded the cheval mirror as a "pleasant invention", but by the 1820s-1830s this furniture item became a staple in every bourgeois' bedroom or dressing room.

[15] The birth of photography coincided with the popularity of cheval mirrors, with superficial similarity between these devices: both produced images of surrounding life on glass surfaces.

[17] In the late 19th century, The Bath of Psyche painting by Frederic Leighton became an iconic expression of the tripartite unity of feminine beauty, classical art, and large mirror (the painter used the surface of the pool for the reflection effect).

[18] The artists pandering to the consumerist society found it easy to please customers through this combination and chose Psyche, a mortal turned into a goddess, as a representation of a woman, creating a new, commodified, image of this mythical figure in front of an eponymous mirror.

[19] The aestheticized images of academic art continued to exist in parallel to this exploitation, with a notable example of Berthe Morisot, who boldly used the "woman in front of a mirror" topic but replaced the voyeuristic aspect with female subjectivity.