Mihály Zichy (Michael von Zichy) - Erotic scene (c.1890s)
Zichy was an excellent draftsman who left behind a huge body of highly accurate drawings, including, but not limited to, scenes of life at the Russian imperial court (he actually lived in Russia for most of his life, and died there, in Saint Petersburg).
Yet, despite his sharp eye and skilled hand - or perhaps because of them? - he is mainly remembered as the author of erotic, often explicitly pornographic, drawings (this one, in fact, is more on the mild side).
I used to share some of them here, but Tumblr consistently bans them and eventually erases them, even from my own stream.
An interesting linguistic vignette: this type of three-panel mirror - like the one we see above the washstand - was called called трельяж (treillage) in Russian (still is, to my knowledge).
The word, however, has nothing to do with what treillage means in French: lattice-like structures placed in gardens and parks (the English word for these is trellis).
Apparently, a peculiar semantic shift took place in Russia, perhaps because of misinterpreting the 'tre-' part of the word as related to three. Over time, трельяж became the standard Russian name for this type of mirrors.
In French, it was traditionally called a miroir à trois faces - literally, a three-faced mirror - or sometimes a miroir triptyque. German is even less inventive: it's simply dreiteiliger Toilettenspiegel, a three-part dressing mirror.
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