A GEORGE III GILTWOOD OVERMANTEL MIRROR

This arched temple-pedimented overmantel mirror is designed in the antique fashion promoted in the 1770s by George III's Rome-trained architect Robert Adam (d. 1792). The overall shape of the frame, its fluted base and its arched cresting applied with wreath, husk swags and roundels is closely related to that of an overmantel mirror that is likely to have been commissioned by John Papillon Twisden at the time of his inheritance of the Bradbourne estate in Kent in 1772. The latter mirror displays a ram's-mask tablet to the centre of the base and is surmounted by an elaborate further carved cresting of a Grecian urn guarded by Apollo's sacred griffins issuing scrolling tendrils, intended to evoke sacrifices at Love's altar in antiquity. The Bradbourne mirror, acquired in 1938 by the Victoria and Albert Museum, is illustrated by H.F. Schiffer, The Mirror Book: English, American & European, Pennsylvania, 1938, figs. 469 and 470. A late 18th-century mirror with Greek key-pattern terminals to the uprights, similar to those of the present mirror, is also illustrated by Schiffer on the same page (ibid, fig. 473).