Get Inspired: Trumeau Mirrors

A trumeau mirror updated with a graphic nineteenth-century botanical depiction of a cactus.

I have never been fond of trumeau mirrors, whether trumeau de glace, trumeau de cheminée, or trumeau whatever. Perhaps I've just seen too many second-rate examples of these tall, thin looking glasses, where the upper panel is filled with an indifferent painting depicting mincing courtiers or twee arrangements of flowers and usually displayed in a saccharine French-style room.

Yesterday, however, I was at a friend's house in Cooperstown, New York, and remembered she owns a pair of matching trumeau mirrors and has jazzed up their tasseled Louis XVI formality with gritty botanical prints depicting tropical plants. So out came my iPhone and I started clicking. One trumeau contains an image of a wonderfully spiky cactus; the other, which hangs in a spare room over a chest of drawers, displays a portrait of a bunch of unripe bananas, as if the stalk had been hacked from a tree with a machete mere moments before. The gutsy works of art add an unexpected south-of-the-border swagger to the elegant green-and-gold frames. One could easily imagine them hanging in a mansion in Mexico City or in the salon of a ranch on the Argentine pampas.

My friend's departure from the trumeau norm gave me an idea that I might pursue, if I ever come across a trumeau that's attractive enough and cheap enough to seduce me. Why not fill the upper section with a mod watercolor, an abstract oil painting, a graphic map, a striking photograph, a Matisse-style collage made by your child, even a fascinating scrap of exotic fabric? After all a trumeau is just a frame with a reflective section below. So why not be creative with what you put in it?

Inspired, I took an online spin through the engrossing website of The Old Print Shop in New York City and found a few interesting possibilities, such as a fantastically fiery Currier & Ives print of the flaming wreck of steamboat Lexington in 1840 and a bold 2001 abstract woodcut by Su-Li Hung.

The trumeau hanging in a friend's spare room is fitted with a botanical image of a bunch of bananas.

Details Count: No-Nail Pictures

Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers at home with one of her several dachshunds. Photograph by Richard Rutledge for American "Vogue," 15 March 1945.

Most people simply pound a nail into a wall when they decide to display a photograph or a painting. Sadly, however, that's where those framed treasures usually stay for time immemorial, often losing their power to attract the eye through daily familiarity. But leaning a work of art against a wall rather than displaying it conventionally on the wall is always more interesting. (And I'm not talking about utilizing those narrow picture shelves popularized by mail-order catalogues.) Casual placement on tabletops, mantles, even the floor, is curiously potent. It implies a certain dégagé attitude toward the treatment of one's possessions as well as, conversely, a sense of deep attention to the intended effect. Even if the work of art in question isn't particularly compelling or valuable, propping gives it more gravitas. Plus, this kind of deployment allows works to be moved around at will without resorting to a hammer.

The impossibly stylish Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, shown above, propped several giltwood-framed paintings on a Greek-key-ornamented desk in her living room in the 1940s. Curiously the table lamps partially obscure the art, tempting one to step forward and take a closer look. (Sometimes great design is about seducing others to experience the world way you do.) The leaned pictures also break up the formality of the installation, loosening the stays, as it were, of the matching lamps and the symmetrical display of nineteenth-century paintings on the wall above.

Tastemaker Pauline de Rothschild, another charter member of the propped-art school, often displayed a small Bonnard painting on a chair carefully placed at her bedside, so it was the first thing the American-born baroness saw when she woke. Precious, but why not? Real style embodies a certain amount of idiosyncrasy.

A great friend of mine, a lady of highly evolved aesthetics, has set a beautiful representation of a flower — I'm sure it's an antique, a Redouté perhaps? — on the floor of her spare but perfectly decorated sitting room overlooking the East River in New York City. The rather small artwork, no bigger than a standard magazine cover, is beautifully framed and placed so low and with such modesty that coming upon it is a delightful surprise. Seeing it out of the corner of one's eye, leaning against the baseboard, is like a gift.