About this work
- *The Looking Glass* is a **pastel on paper**, measuring **27¾ × 20½ inches** (71 × 52 cm) , executed in the 20th century. - The work dates to the **20th century** and its subject matter aligns with Enjolras's recurring themes of **lady, women, elegant, night, soirée, evening, light, and mirror**.
- Enjolras is best known for **intimate portraits of young women** performing mundane activities, **often illuminated by lamplight**.
- He earned the nickname *"peintre des reflets"* — **"painter of reflections"** — for his intimate scenes of women bathed in interior light, rendered in pastel, oil, or watercolour.
*The Looking Glass* draws you in before you've had a moment to prepare. A young woman stands — or perhaps pauses, mid-gesture — before her mirror, caught in the private ritual of self-contemplation. Rendered in pastel on paper at a generous 27¾ by 20½ inches , the composition has the intimacy of something witnessed rather than staged. Enjolras works his signature magic here: warm, directed light falls across the figure, tracing the contours of her face, the sheen of her dress, the glow of skin against shadow. The palette moves through the registers of evening and lamplight — the same vocabulary of night, soirée, and interior luminosity that defines his finest work. The mirror doubles and deepens the scene, creating a visual loop between the woman and her reflection that gives the viewer no clear point of exit.
Dated to the **20th century** , *The Looking Glass* belongs to the mature phase of Enjolras's long career — a period when his preoccupations had fully crystallised around the figure of the elegant Parisienne in her domestic world. Having begun with landscapes, Enjolras had by this point fully committed to the portraiture of elegant young women rendered by lamplight or dramatic artificial lighting , and the mirror motif gave him his richest pictorial problem: light bouncing off glass, the partial revelation of a face seen twice, the suggestion of an inner life glimpsed in the act of looking. That command of reflected and refracted light is precisely what earned him the sobriquet *"peintre des reflets"* — painter of reflections — and nowhere is that title more apt than in a work whose very subject is the act of reflection itself.
On a wall, this pastel rewards a room that already understands atmosphere — a bedroom, a well-appointed study, a dressing room with soft overhead light. Its vertical format and human scale make it feel like a window into another interior rather than a picture hung on a wall. It speaks most directly to viewers drawn to the Belle
