6th Screen by James DuncanStanding Mirror by James Duncan

Representations of the Greek god Narcissus conventionally show him gazing at himself in a reflecting pool, the first mirror.

(Narcissus by Caravaggio)

The history of the mirror is a fascinating story of an object which has gone from being extraordinarily precious to absolutely ordinary. At times laws were even set up to govern who could own one, how many, and of what size.  We know that the ancient Greeks had mirrors in the 5th century BC, humble ones made of polished bronze and more precious ones of silver or gold.  These were either convex or concave so that they distorted the reflected image. Never more than five to eight inches in diameter, their sole purpose was for grooming.  The Romans, who discovered how to create larger polished metal mirrors produced the first decorative wall mirrors.  In fact, they built entirely mirrored rooms in which to hold orgies. It wasn’t until the 15^th century, however that glass mirrors were developed.  Although clearer than metal mirrors, they still distorted the image.  By late in that century the glass-makers of the island of Murano in Venice began to produce the first mirrors that even approached the quality of the mirrors we have today.  But they were unable to make mirrors more than forty square inches because of the limitations of their glass blowing techniques. Nonetheless, so valuable to the Republic were the skilled Murano mirror-makers that they there were prosecuted for treason if they attempted to go abroad to work!

Up through the 18^th century glass mirrors remained very costly. So ordinary people continued to use small metal mirrors. In fact, in the early 16^th century a Murano mirror in a silver frame sold for nearly three times the cost of a painting by Raphael.

With improved techniques of glassmaking the cost of mirrors declined sufficiently so that during the 17^th century wealthy people in France began to decorate their public rooms with mirrors. Typically, during this period mirrors were placed across from windows in order to lighten dark rooms.  This trend reached its apogee with the construction of Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1684. Seventeen mirrors each composed of eighteen pieces of glass reflected the view out of seventeen matching windows during the day, and magnified the play of candlelight and gilt at night.

(Versailles, Hall of Mirrors

But limitations on the size of mirrors changed at the beginning of the 18^th century when the first cast mirrors were made at Saint Gobain in France.  People were astonished when they first saw a single piece of mirrored glass seven feet by four feet.  The discovery of how to cast glass moved the center of mirror production from Venice to France in a stroke.  And just as the Venetian Republic had tried to protect its expertise in glass blowing, so now the French tried valiantly, although unsuccessfully, to protect the secret of casting glass.   But again the new large mirrors were extremely expensive due to a more than fifty percent breakage rate during manufacture.  They were also very unstable as the mercury-silvered backing on the glass (the tain) was susceptible to damp — so much so, that, throughout the 18^th century mirrors were never found in entrance halls of houses!  By the early 19^th century the tain had been stabilised. And so people have placed mirrors in their entrance halls ever since.

In the 18th century the use of mirrors as decorative items expanded greatly.  They were embedded in wardrobes and it was at this time that the mirrored dressing table was invented.  As the price of mirrors declined slightly, people could fill their houses with them, and they did!   Now, not only were mirrors placed opposite windows to capture light, they were used elsewhere in houses as well.  In particular, the craze for over mantel mirrors swept Paris and precious paintings were removed to be replaced by mirrors in painted, gilded, or tortoise shell frames.  So enamoured did people become of mirrors that the value of paintings and fine tapestries nearly collapsed.

In some places the craze for mirrors among the wealthy became a cause for official concern.  For example, the Republic of Geneva passed a law prohibiting citizens from having more than one mirror per room or having any larger than thirty two inches in height.  While by the end of the 18^th century, small mirrors were widespread throughout the population (it is estimated that two thirds of the population of Paris had one), large mirrors were still very costly and continued to be a mark of status.

Birds Mirror by James Duncan

During the 19th century, the industrial revolution ushered in technological changes that greatly reduced the cost of large mirrors. For the first time large glass mirrors became accessible to people of modest means.  The predictable result was to immediately decrease the status value of mirrors for elites.  For the latter, mirrors became functional, commonplace items and so the wealthy returned to their pre-18^th century use of paintings.

Palm Beach Mirror by James Duncan and Cynthia Thomas

By the 20^th century mirrors had dropped in price yet again. Thus they became an ordinary object even for people of modest means.  And this is where we remain today.  We see mirrors now as functional for reflecting our image, capturing light or reflecting our surroundings. Mirrors themselves are no longer precious. When they are highly valued, it is because of the beauty of the frames that we surround them with or the fine furniture we cover in them.

Trocadero Dining Table By James

We all know that different cultures have different dining hours.  In Seville, many restaurants are packed with families at midnight.  The Spanish may be an extreme case, but if you go to a restaurant in Paris before nine in the evening, chances are that your only dining companions will be tourists.  The French consider dining at eight in the same light that an American would view booking a table at six in a chic New York restaurant.

The reason, of course, is that food rituals are highly symbolic.

But a glance at history tells us that the “proper” dinner hour for elites in a country like England, where records of mealtimes extend back centuries, has varied wildly.  In fact, taking the long view, dinner doesn’t really refer to a time of day so much as to a type of meal.  We now associate it with the evening meal, except in the case of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes Sunday dinners, which are often served in the afternoon.  If we consider the meals of the day to be a planetary system with dinner as the sun, then breakfast, lunch, and supper are smaller planets trapped within its gravitational pull.

At the beginning of the 16^th century aristocrats ate dinner, the main meal of the day, at 11 am!  This was followed by a light supper in the late afternoon with numerous snacks throughout the day. Neither breakfast nor lunch had been invented at this time.

By the mid 17^th century fashionable people ate dinner at 1 pm. A hundred years later it was more common to begin dinner between 3 and 5pm.  By the mid 18^th century the retreating dinner hour prompted the invention of breakfast and a noontime snack.  During these years, upper class Englishmen rose at 8 am and ate breakfast at 10.  It was a light, but sociable meal of coffee and toast that never lasted less than an hour, but often continued until 1:00 pm.  If breakfast finished early, people might have a snack around noon to tide them over until dinner.  Interestingly, at this time such people considered it “morning” until they had dinner, which meant they said “good morning” to each other until 5 pm!

If you were invited to dinner during the late 18^th century, you would be expected to arrive around 3.45 and sit down to eat shortly after 4.30.  You would probably remain at the table for four hours or more, whereupon the table would be cleared and port wine and dessert brought in.  After an interval where guests could freshen up, tea would be served, which in turn would be followed by a light supper of hot and cold dishes, sweets, fruit and wine served between 10 and 11pm.  And so the dinner guest who arrived before 4 in the afternoon would not leave before midnight having had dinner, tea and supper!

In the nineteenth century lunch was invented. As the dinner hour retreated further and further into the evening and breakfast was served earlier, the noontime snack was elaborated into a meal in itself. However, luncheon was often thought to be primarily a meal for women, an association which survives today as the “ladies lunch”. By the mid 19^th century, the fashionable dinnertime was 6 pm.  The theater began at 7 pm and so now the post-theater late supper had to be invented!  It remains today the sole holdover of the late supper that had been so fashionable in the 18^th century.  By the mid 19^th century breakfast was earlier, at 8.00, and had become the often solitary meal that it remains today.  It was however more substantial with eggs and bacon, in addition to coffee, tea and toast.  By the late 19^th century lunch was regularly eaten at 1 pm by men as well as women, although the lower classes who couldn’t afford candles and had different work schedules ate dinner earlier, thereby continuing the older pattern of two meals a day.

By the early 20^th century the fashionable lunch hovered between 1.00 and 1.30 pm and the dinner hour continued to advance with quiet dinners at home served at 7.30 and dinner parties beginning at 8pm. In the 21^st century much is being made in the press about the death of the meal and the great increase  of snacking which is criticized as anti-social, as well as leading to obesity.  But it should be remembered that the snack is essentially a pre 19^th century form of food consumption. So the culture of snacking is a recycling of the past which fragments the temporal order of the day structured by mealtimes and no doubt will lead to further chapters in the history of dining.

Driftwood Dining Table