The Belgian artist Alfred Stevens is believed to have painted this image of an auburn-haired woman standing before a mirror around 1872. The same model has been identified elsewhere as his sister-in-law. She wears a blue floral kimono and holds a Japanese uchiwa flat fan. The scene stems from the artist’s fascination with both Japanese art and design and Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting, in which the motif of a solitary woman gazing into a mirror proliferated. The work was commissioned by the Met’s early patron Catharine Lorillard Wolfe after another version of the composition (1872, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Liège).
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