Pier Mirror

This pier mirror, one of a pair, is among the finest ever used in Boston, Massachusetts. It may be the one that appears in framemaker John Doggett’s account book in February 1807 made for the Boston merchant John Osborn, who purchased the Otis House from Harrison Gray Otis in 1801.  In 1807 Osborn was living in the second Harrison Gray Otis House, but when he moved back in 1814, he almost certainly brought this pair of mirrors with him.

The tablet across the top shows a scene from the Trojan War. The taste for the neoclassical style in architecture and furnishings had appeared in England and France in the mid-eighteenth century, but reached its height in America in the early years of the nineteenth.

Probably John Doggett (1780-1857)
Roxbury, Mass. 1807
White pine, gesso, gilding

Museum purchase with funds from an anonymous donor
1975.167.1-2