The Most Expensive Mirrors Ever Found on Antiques Roadshow!

[00:00:00]$8. That's all she paid.

[00:00:03]And for 4 years, it just hung on the wall, glowing, sparkling, making everyone who looked into it feel a little more glamorous than they actually were. She thought the crystals might be fake.

[00:00:14]They weren't. Palwa, short for Palm and Walter, was a West German lighting company that became one of the most sought-after names in mid-century decorative lighting.

[00:00:26]Their illuminated mirrors were designed by Kristoff Palm, and what set them apart wasn't just the light, it was the layering.

[00:00:35]Large crystals in front, smaller ones recessed behind, all arranged to create a depth that a flat frame simply can't replicate.

[00:00:45]When the bulbs come on, the whole thing breathes.

[00:00:48]The materials were never compromised.

[00:00:51]The frame is 24-karat gold-plated brass, set with faceted Austrian Swarovski crystals, the same crystals used in fine jewelry and couture fashion.

[00:01:03]This wasn't decorative kitsch, it was German precision applied to glamour, produced at a moment when West Germany's design industry was quietly competing with Italian and Scandinavian masters for the attention of the world's most discerning interiors.

[00:01:20]This mirror dates to around 1970, peak Palwa, peak groovy.

[00:01:26]The appraiser confirmed it still works.

[00:01:29]The crystals are intact, and the optical effect is fully intact. This at auction is worth more than $7.99.

[00:01:37]>> I hope so.

[00:01:39]>> Well, it's worth two to three thousand dollars at auction, conservatively.

[00:01:44]>> Wow. Oh, that's amazing.

[00:01:46]That is amazing.

[00:01:48]>> Do you go thrifting a lot?

[00:01:49]>> Uh every day.

[00:01:51]>> It started with a broken mirror that nobody could sell.

[00:01:54]A Belgian shopkeeper's imperfect impulse buy from a Parisian market kept because they liked the style not because they knew what it was. 60 years later, it's hanging above a dog bowl.

[00:02:06]Somewhere, Line Vautrin is either laughing or furious.

[00:02:10]Line Vautrin was born in 1913 in Paris into a family of jewelers and metalworkers.

[00:02:18]She taught herself metal foundry and went door-to-door selling cast jewelry before landing a stand at the 1937 Paris International Exposition where she did well enough to open her own shop.

[00:02:32]But her defining invention came later.

[00:02:35]She developed a material she coined Talosel, layers of cellulose acetate that she carved, gouged, molded, and encrusted with colored mirrored glass.

[00:02:48]It was this material that unlocked the mirrors and the mirrors that made her immortal.

[00:02:54]Vogue called her the poetess of metal.

[00:02:57]This particular mirror, circa 1960, Talosel resin with small mirrored panels surrounding a central convex mercury glass mirror, bears her signature on the reverse along with decades of cigar smoke from a Belgian grandfather baked deep into the resin.

[00:03:16]The appraiser called the smoke reassuring. In the world of Line Vautrin, it's the fakes that look pristine.

[00:03:23]>> And getting together with my colleagues, we feel a reasonable auction estimate for this mirror, as beautiful mirror, would be $40,000 to $60,000.

[00:03:31]>> Oh, wow.

[00:03:33]That is That's crazy.

[00:03:36]>> [laughter] >> I probably shouldn't keep it above the dog bowl anymore.

[00:03:40]>> Probably not.

[00:03:42]>> [laughter] >> There was one which had more like Sputnik type mirrors. That one sold within the last couple of years for over $400,000.

[00:03:49]>> Appraised in 2019 at $40,000 to $60,000, the market has only accelerated since.

[00:03:58]Her Taliesin mirrors have made some very substantial sums in specialist 20th century design sales in Paris and New York. A flamboyant mirror hammered at $100,800 at Rago Auctions in 2023, double its high estimate.

[00:04:18]The current estimated value for a signed example of this quality and size sits comfortably at $80,000 to $120,000 at auction in 2026.

[00:04:30]$2 a yard sale in Hurley, New Mexico.

[00:04:35]She thought it might be copper.

[00:04:37]Maybe some mother-of-pearl.

[00:04:38]She had no idea she was carrying one of the most iconic objects in American decorative arts history.

[00:04:45]Tiffany Studios, New York was established in 1880 by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

[00:04:51]And by the century, it had become the defining force in American Art Nouveau.

[00:04:56]Lamps, windows, vases, mosaics, Tiffany's workshop touched everything.

[00:05:03]But among the studio's rarer metalwork pieces, the peacock mirror stands apart.

[00:05:09]The peacock was a personal favorite of Louis Comfort Tiffany's and it's not hard to see why.

[00:05:15]Peacock feathers were prized for their iridescent quality, their great range of color, and their diaphanous nature, as well as their symbolic standing as an icon of renewal and new life.

[00:05:28]The motif became the consummate emblem of the Art Nouveau movement. This mirror, circa 1905, is constructed from chased patinated bronze depicting peacock feathers across the entire frame, front and back, inset with two types of Tiffany glass, The leaded variety familiar from windows and lamps and the luminous reflective glass used in mosaics.

[00:05:54]The original beveled mirror plate remains.

[00:05:58]A stamp on the back reads Tiffany Studios, New York.

[00:06:02]This is the smaller, less elaborate version of the design, which came in at least four sizes.

[00:06:09]But smaller here doesn't mean lesser.

[00:06:12]It means rare.

[00:06:13]>> Well, something like this could sell in a shop for $25,000.

[00:06:20]>> My god, I had no idea it would >> Well, it's um really wonderful example.

[00:06:26]Thank you for bringing it in.

[00:06:27]>> Okay, thank you very much. I I I had no idea when I bought it. I just loved it.

[00:06:37]>> It started its life as two completely separate objects. A jade carving of peaches and a jade dragon belt hook.

[00:06:45]Neither of them ever intended to be part of a mirror.

[00:06:49]A century later, they were sitting in a box in someone's living room described simply as Asian trinkets.

[00:06:57]What they actually are is a masterclass in Chinese symbolism hidden inside an Edwardian vanity piece.

[00:07:05]The two pieces of jade date to 18th century China.

[00:07:09]Celadon whitish jade, the pale green white stone prized for its spiritual significance and worked with extraordinary precision.

[00:07:19]The upper plaque depicts peaches, one of the most potent of all Chinese auspicious motifs, representing longevity, abundance, and a life well extended. The lower piece is a garment or belt hook, a stylized dragon, the kind worn fastened to an emperor's clothing.

[00:07:39]By the Qing Dynasty, these belt hooks had largely lost their practical function, becoming scholarly desktop ornaments. But the finest examples were still carved with remarkable skill.

[00:07:51]Around 1920, someone with a very good eye, and very likely access to Asian antique markets, had these two jade pieces set into a silver mounted hand mirror.

[00:08:04]The frame chased with bats, another Chinese auspicious symbol for good fortune, and fitted with its own custom box.

[00:08:13]The whole ensemble reflects the Edwardian passion for Orientalism and the vanity set as decorative showpiece.

[00:08:21]>> The value in a retail setting, the box and the hand mirror together, would be $10,000.

[00:08:27]>> Oh, wow. Okay.

[00:08:29]Good to know.

[00:08:30]>> [laughter] >> It's exciting.

[00:08:33]>> The family called it the Marie Antoinette mirror.

[00:08:37]They'd been told it was hers.

[00:08:39]And honestly, looking at it, you'd want to believe it, too. Porphyry is not an ordinary stone. The deep red marble was quarried exclusively from a single site in ancient Egypt, and that source was eventually exhausted entirely. What survived became among the most prized materials in the decorative arts, used for imperial Roman sarcophagi, papal altars, and the grandest commissions of European royalty.

[00:09:09]A piece built around multiple columns, plaques, and a base of porphyry, combined with hand-chased bronze lions of exceptional quality, is not a modest object. It is a deliberate display of extreme expense and taste.

[00:09:25]The Louis the XVI style, with its refined neoclassical lines, was the height of French court fashion in the 1770s and 1780s, Marie Antoinette's era.

[00:09:38]And here was the temptation.

[00:09:40]On the back of the mirror, the initials A.R. Antoinette Regina, and the date 1787 in Roman numerals.

[00:09:50]Just enough to make the story sing, except the inscription doesn't hold up.

[00:09:55]The appraiser saw immediately that the writing is inconsistent with what would appear on a piece that actually passed through royal hands.

[00:10:03]Someone at some point took an already magnificent 19th century French mirror and added fiction to it.

[00:10:11]The mirror itself dates to around 1875 to 1885.

[00:10:17]A period when French craftsmen were producing exquisite Louis the 16th revival pieces for the wealthiest collectors in Europe.

[00:10:25]>> So now, at auction it's about 18 to 20,000 dollars, but it's still a wonderful piece.

[00:10:30]>> a great piece.

[00:10:31]>> And I love it.

[00:10:32]>> piece. Thank you, Stuart.

[00:10:34]>> If this was owned by Marie Antoinette, its value would be in excess of 500,000 dollars.

[00:10:41]>> Most people, when they hear the name Klimt, picture one thing.

[00:10:46]Gold.

[00:10:48]The shimmering, almost hallucinatory canvases of Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, Portrait of Adele.

[00:10:55]Works that sell today for hundreds of millions of dollars and hang in the most famous museums on Earth.

[00:11:02]What almost nobody pictures is a mirror picked up at a local antique dealer's in 1976 for 350 dollars. But that mirror has a name on the back, and it isn't Gustav.

[00:11:15]It's Georg.

[00:11:17]Georg Klimt was Gustav's younger brother, a metalworker and sculptor, and like Gustav, a committed member of the Vienna Secession, the radical artistic movement that detonated through the Austro-Hungarian art world around the turn of the 20th century.

[00:11:35]The secessionists had one unifying ambition to tear down the ornamental excess of the Rococo tradition and replace it with something cleaner, bolder, more honest. Where previous craftsmen had piled on the flourishes, the curling acanthus leaves, the gilded cherubs, the relentless fussiness of the old decorative order, the secessionists stripped everything back to geometry, to line, to form that justified itself.

[00:12:07]This mirror is that philosophy in hammered [clears throat] copper.

[00:12:11]Georg worked his material by hand, beating it into precise geometric patterns with a clarity that feels almost architectural, closer to a building by Otto Wagner, who was designing Vienna's subway stations in the same years, than to anything that came before.

[00:12:28]Every surface decision is intentional.

[00:12:31]Nothing decorates. Everything means.

[00:12:34]And then there is the motto engraved at the center.

[00:12:37]The owner translated it herself and she got it right.

[00:12:41]Mirror, mirror [clears throat] on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

[00:12:45]The oldest question a mirror can ask.

[00:12:48]Georg Klimt, craftsman, metalworker, the brother history largely forgot, embedded it into a secessionist object of severe geometric beauty.

[00:12:58]The irony is almost too perfect.

[00:13:00]>> I think we're looking at um value at auction probably conservatively in the 20 to 30 thousand dollar range.

[00:13:08]>> So, that's great.

[00:13:13]>> There is a rule among antique dealers.

[00:13:16]When something looks too good, it probably is.

[00:13:19]Perfect gilding, crisp carving, no blemishes, walk away.

[00:13:25]What you actually want are wormholes, rough-cut wood on the back, traces of original gilt that have gone fiery and uneven with age.

[00:13:34]You want a mirror that looks like it survived the French Revolution, because this one may well have.

[00:13:40]Made around 1780, just years before that revolution upended the world that produced it, this carved and gilded French mirror traveled from a cabinet maker's workshop across the Atlantic, through a Swiss family in Lucerne, and finally into an American living room, where it stops guests cold the moment they walk through the door.

[00:14:03]The construction tells the story precisely.

[00:14:06]Wood carved by hand, layered with gesso, then gilded, and in the C curves along the sides and around the flower basket at the crown, you can still see flashes of the original gold, fiery and alive beneath two and a half centuries of handling. The mirror glass itself was replaced at some point, as it almost always is. That's not a flaw. That's expected. What isn't expected in most mirrors of this type is that it's genuine.

[00:14:38]The vast majority are later reproductions. This one is not.

[00:14:42]>> If you were going to insure this, I think you would probably want to insure this for $3,000.

[00:14:47]>> Oh, wow. Wonderful.

[00:14:49]Oh.

[00:14:51]Wonderful. Wonderful.

[00:14:53]Oh. Oh.

[00:14:58]>> She was running early, stopped at a yard sale on a whim, spotted something filthy, haggled the price down from $10 to $7, and drove away with what she assumed was a decorative trinket.

[00:15:12]It sat on her bureau for months, unremarkable, unexamined.

[00:15:17]That $7 purchase turned out to be solid sterling silver, hallmarked London made, and crafted by a named silversmith.

[00:15:27]Not antique, as it turns out.

[00:15:30]Made in 1997, but that's where the story gets interesting.

[00:15:34]British hallmarking is one of the oldest consumer protection systems in the world, and it is ruthlessly precise.

[00:15:42]Unbroken in practice since the 14th century, it exists for exactly this reason. To tell the truth about silver when the eye cannot.

[00:15:51]Tiny stamps pressed into the metal tell you everything. A lion for sterling, a leopard's head for London specifically, a date letter corresponding to the exact year of assay, and the maker's initials.

[00:16:06]In this case, those initials belong to Neil Lasher, a London silversmith who produced these mirrors and frames in various sizes throughout the late 20th century. The hallmarks don't lie, and they don't miss a detail.

[00:16:20]The mirror looks convincingly Victorian, which was entirely the point. Lasher worked in repoussé, hammering flat silver sheet into a carved mold to raise a three-dimensional design of flowers and scrollwork from the surface.

[00:16:36]It's a technique with roots going back centuries, here executed in thick, high-quality silver with exceptional fidelity.

[00:16:44]The condition is remarkable.

[00:16:46]The silver is heavy, and buried under the grime of a yard sale table was enough craftsmanship to make an expert stop and look twice.

[00:16:57]>> If I were to see this come up for auction, I would expect it to bring in the neighborhood of $500 to $700.

[00:17:04]>> Wow, that's fantastic.

[00:17:07]That is fantastic. I am just blown away and extremely surprised. Wow, thank you so much.

[00:17:14]>> I want to go shopping with you.

[00:17:16]>> [laughter] >> Wow, that is fabulous.

[00:17:21]>> Imagine standing in an American home in 1900.

[00:17:25]The walls are dark, the curtains heavy, the rooms closed in on themselves.

[00:17:30]Electric light is still a novelty.

[00:17:32]Gaslight casts more shadow than glow.

[00:17:36]Into that darkness, someone, a woman named Josephine Davis, hung a mirror she had painted herself.

[00:17:43]And suddenly there was a sunset in the room.

[00:17:46]A pier mirror is designed to hang between two windows, catching and multiplying the light that comes through them.

[00:17:54]Josephine understood that.

[00:17:56]But she went further, painting the wooden panels flanking the glass with a riverscape that moves from dark to luminous, a fisherman on a moody, shadowed shore at the bottom. The scene lifting upward into an open, glowing sky. Foliage creeps across the mirror's face, so that when you look into it, you are looking at yourself through trees.

[00:18:20]This was the aesthetic movement, the late 19th century belief that art belonged in the home, not just in galleries, and that women had both the right and the sensibility to make it.

[00:18:33]Josephine was an amateur, but she had genuine instincts.

[00:18:37]The color transitions are confident, the composition is calm and deliberate, and the original painted surface survives completely intact, which, more than anything else, is what gives it its value today.

[00:18:50]She married in 1888.

[00:18:53]She painted this sometime after.

[00:18:55]It passed through her family for over a century before arriving here.

[00:18:59]>> I would say an auction estimate would probably be in the $1,000 to $1,500 range.

[00:19:05]>> Okay. And it was originally made as a decorative art object.

[00:19:09]>> it.