Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self‐Portraits

In Jan van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Portrait (1494) the painter’s own image appears in miniature form in a convex mirror behind the couple’s heads, which seems to imply that I, Jan van Eyck, really was there to witness this betrothal, and you, the viewer, are now seeing just what I saw. Clara Peeters (born Antwerp, 1589) specialised in precise still‐life paintings in which a tiny, distorted self‐portrait would appear on reflective surfaces up to six times.

Frances Borzello draws attention to this curious device in a chapter on “The Seventeenth Century” in this fascinating and sometimes unsettling survey, which ranges...