This mirror would have been used on a dressing table, and might well have been surrounded by a host of small boxes, brushes and candlesticks, all carved in the same manner. This sort of decoration became a speciality of the town of Nancy, in Lorraine, France, in the late 17th century, in response to a series of laws which made it illegal to manufacture such small luxury items from precious metals.

The laws had been passed after a succession of expensive foreign wars, when Louis XIV, the King of France, found that his reserves of gold and silver were severely depleted. The carvers of Nancy in Eastern France saw their chance and made a great success of their highly decorative boxes, mirrors and other small objects carved from a very fine grained cherry wood known as bois de Sainte-Lucie. Both the forms and the decoration of these objects were based on contemporary silverware. The trade continued until at least the 1740s.