Now that all our shampoos and moisturizers and body washes and what-have-you in our bathrooms have crowded out cosmetics, hairbrushes and mirrors, some of us are thinking about putting dressing tables back in our bedrooms so we can sit comfortably, as our mothers and grandmothers used to say, “to put on our faces.”
Then the dilemma becomes a decorating issue. While it may be chic in the bathroom to have medicine cabinets, hair dryers, tweezers and nail equipment that look as if you bought them at a dentist's supply house, they don't look so terrific in a bedroom, especially not with the kind of desirable tables that have been turning up in sale rooms recently: sweet, simple ones of mahogany, almost all made in the 1800s in New Brunswick or the Eastern Seaboard. Even the kidney-shaped dressing tables of the 1950s, the ones with the glazed chintz skirts and the puffy stools, are desperately fought over at auction.
Any of these tables can ring a faint chime in the back of your mind… whatever happened to that old silver dresser set left to you years ago, the one your grandmother mentioned had been a wedding present? Dig it out and you'll probably find that there was a good reason you packed it away; the silver backs on the clothes and hairbrushes are gorgeous but the brushes are too mushy to tame your hair or take off a day's worth of cat hair. And the comb – again, the handle is lovely, but the tortoiseshell teeth are broken. Unless you're using it for earrings or safety pins, the powder jar with its eider puff probably still has some of Granny's pink powder gummed around the edges. But the mirror – ah, the mirror: it's still useful and beautiful. No wonder hand mirrors have become collectors' items.
The nicest are the sterling silver ones. If you find one, make sure the handle is secure, the silver isn't bruised (dented and battered), that the mirror itself has a bevelled edge, that the hallmarks are there. If you can't find the sterling hallmarks, it's either plated or it was made somewhere other than Great Britain, Canada or the United States. (Good hallmark books include Continental and Eastern European marks.)
The average sterling silver hand mirror is about 10 to 12 inches long and the most desirable, made between the 1880s and 1920, have round backs as opposed to the rectangular, angled or square ones with long, pointed handles; these ones are newer, dating to the 1920s and 1930s. At fine dealers, you will pay at least $250 for a good silver hand mirror. After searching the Internet, I found three fine ones described in an English dealer's catalogue: a 1936 sterling silver Art Deco hand mirror made by William Neale of Birmingham in 1936, priced at $477; a 1905 Edwardian sterling silver Art Nouveau mirror made by W. J. Myatt and Co. of Birmingham for $673, and another Art Nouveau hand mirror made by J.R. Gaunt of Chester in 1913 at $600.
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