The Mirror

Chase painted 'The Mirror' around 1900 in his celebrated Shinnecock Hills studio environment, where mirrors, exotic objects, and fashionably dressed women served as recurring compositional devices. The mirror as motif allowed Chase to double pictorial space, explore the relationship between surfaces, and reflect on the act of looking itself—a theme with strong resonance in the post-Impressionist decade. The Cincinnati Art Museum acquisition places the work in a collection that has long valued American Impressionism's dialogue with European refinement.

Chase exploits the mirror to create a layered spatial recession, playing the flat reflective surface against the three-dimensionality of the room. His brushwork is characteristically fluid, with the reflected image rendered with slightly looser handling than the primary space.