Modernėjanti Lietuvos visuomenė ir veidrodžiai interjeruose: nuo prabangos iki būtinybės

ENA sign of luxury and prestige during the former centuries, a mirror became an accessible and, finally, necessary attribute of the housing interior and everyday life for all social groups: in addition to mirrors, which still maintained the status of a work of applied art in the 19th century, cheaper mass production items appeared. This phenomenon became possible not only with the improvement in mirror manufacturing technology, but also with the changes in society's standards: the system of social classes slowly disintegrated, giving way to new social structures. In the present paper, mirrors as a hardly explored group of works of applied art have been chosen for an analysis of the Important 19th century changes in the structure of the social classes, manufacturing and consumption, which determined the transition of mirrors from luxury attributes to everyday household objects in the period from the second part of the 19th century to the first part of the 20th century.The aim is to show how these changes were reflected in the housing environment. The author of the paper describes the specific features of mirror manufacturing, trade and consumption in the period from the second part of the 19th century to the early 20th century, referring to the inventories of manor houses of the 19th century, early 20th century iconography with manor interiors, and early 20th century publications: periodicals, city guides, calendars, commercial reference books, industrial catalogues and exhibition catalogues of applied art. The received data is classified in reference to the two social groups under discussion: the nobility and the new bourgeois, whose basis consisted of merchants. [From the publication]