The Full-length Mirror

In a simple bare room, featuring only three objects, a sofa, a full-length mirror and a picture on the wall, a young woman stands in quiet contemplation of her appearance. She wears a striped dress with an overdress of a pale grey, tied in a bow at the waist with a black fringed scarf. Her hair is piled up with one plait at the back. She holds her hands together, grasping a small red flower, the only touch of bright colour in the picture.

Depictions of young women at their mirror were popular among the Impressionist painters, and painted by both Edouard Manet (1832‒1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841‒1895). This subject can be placed in a much longer tradition of images of women at their toilette, often presented in the guise of Venus, the personification of female beauty, admiring herself in a mirror, as in The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) by Diego Velázquez.

The young woman is Gonzalès’s younger sister Jeanne, also an artist and her constant model throughout her career. The subject is typical of her portrayals of young women which were shaped by the work of her first teacher Charles Chaplin and her second, Manet. It is probable that Gonzalès painted this in around 1869‒70, just after she became Manet’s only formal pupil.