While his contemporaries in the Scottish Colourist group owe the majority of their practice and outlook to the French modernists, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell very much combined his French influence with that of his Scottish surroundings and to the British Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite artists such as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargeant and John Lavery. Cadell moved with his family to Paris in 1898, at sixteen years old, and he enrolled at the Académie Julian the same year. In this t.mes , the young artist would have seen the work of the Impressionists at the Musée du Luxembourg and the landmark Van Gogh exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.

The theme of a woman in a beautifully decorated and plush interior was a frequent subject for Cadell in the 1910s, known as Reflections. By this t.mes , Cadell was an admired artist in Edinburgh’s high society, and he himself lived in a desirable and spacious apartment at 130 George Street. He developed the 'genre of the interior' throughout this period, often featuring a glamorous woman staged in a frieze-like sweep of the room, or a closer-up more intimate study of the face and torso, posed against a piece of furniture. In many of Cadell’s most acclaimed pieces, that piece was a mirror, and he perfected the pensive and artistic pose of the modern woman with her reflection.

The model for this work was Miss Bethia Don Wauchope (1864-1944), who was his muse for over 15 years. Her family lived close by to Cadell's studio at 12 Ainslie Place, so they were likely family friends. Bethia appears repeatedly in the Reflections series, often wearing a black cloche hat with ribbon, pink flower and gloves, and black V-necked dress. One imagines the artist and sitter in this occasion to be great friends.

His glamorous interiors take inspiration from Impressionist art, particularly the work of Édouard Manet, who used expanses of brilliant white set against black backgrounds with minimal accent colour. Cadell was fascinated by his techniques, and incorporated the same dramatic use of colour and stage setting, while synthesising it with his own known contexts and people. Manet and the French Modernists were being hailed by the British art critic Roger Fry at the t.mes , and were causing controversy in conventional British high society. Cadell’s portraits not only show interest in Manet and Cézanne but also Lavery and Sargeant, with their colour, loose and expressionist brushstrokes, and the pose and styling of his female model.

Cadell was also interested in Edinburgh’s architectural history, and took much care in demonstrating the beauty of the city’s well-known elegant and spacious apartments with large windows in the centre of town. The Cheval Glass dates around the similar t.mes to Cadell’s largest interior painting, entitled Afternoon. Cadell was a man of fashion, as his luscious and elegantly-decorated interior backdrops show, and the woman in his pictures are of a similar calibre. As seen in the figure in The Cheval Glass, his models are dressed in the latest contemporary fashions and represent the ‘New Woman’- they are bold, aspirational and unapologetically feminine, similar to those found in Manet’s Parisian world.

There is little record of the painting being exhibited in Cadell's lifet.mes , as many from this series were just recorded as Reflections, making it difficult to decipher which one was shown. Cadell was the only Colourist to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, and was much more a part of the Edinburgh upper classes. Cadell regarded the interior of his studio and the women who posed in it as an entirely new subject, worthy of his full attention and dedication, where each detail plays just an important a part in creating the overall impression of the whole.