Before the Mirror by Pierre-Paul-Léon Glaize

Léon Glaize's 'Before the Mirror' (1873, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) is a painting built around an absence. The title directs you to expect a reflection, but the enormous cheval mirror filling the right side of the canvas is turned away, its glass face hidden, her image withheld. Glaize gives you the frame without the function, and the whole painting turns on that denial.

Look at what we do see. The woman's hands clutch her fur-trimmed robe closed at the waist, a gesture that reads as modesty or self-possession. Her face tilts upward, not toward the mirror we can see, but somewhere outside the frame. The parted neckline of the white satin robe introduces a tension between intimacy and exposure, this is a private, unwitnessed moment, and we have not been invited in.

Glaize painted this in 1873, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris. While Monet, Degas, and Morisot were dismantling academic tradition, Glaize doubled down on the neoclassical techniques he had absorbed from his father and his teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme. The liquid satin and thick white fur are rendered with a smooth, almost photographic precision, two luxury materials in near-identical hue, a quiet technical tour de force.

The painting's real subject, then, is not vanity or self-regard. It is the choice not to see, or not to show. What do you think she would have seen if the mirror had been turned?