But interviews in recent days with friends, relatives and neighbors reveal a cracked-mirror portrait of a man who comes across as affable, guileless and charming to some and pampered, arrogant and irresponsible to others.
To start with, the look seemed a pastiche of the bourgeois: the sun hats with visors built in like reflective car mirrors; portrait necklines and the graceful elegance of a fabric pattern that looked like a rhythmic flow of water.
Mauve and white toile wallpaper, red shades and hand-crocheted valences set a scene reminiscent of grandmother's house with a collection of teapots, mirrors, portraits, a dollhouse, and a mixture of tables and chairs.
Another is due to its underdoggish lack of narcissism: look above the bathroom sink and find, instead of a mirror, a portrait of a wizened crone.
Man in the mirror: self-portraits Andrew Marr | New Statesman | 30 April 2014 Review of The Self Portrait: a Cultural History, by James Hall, which argues that the history of the self-portrait is also a history of the social status of the artist.
She is pensive, alert, her concentrated gaze seeing far beyond him; had her eyes been open, she would have looked, you feel, almost exactly the same in the mirror-image portrait he took after her death.
There's the mirror self-portrait.
And it is amazing how much functionality auto companies can now cram into a mirror: the portrait-shaped mirrors on the Aviator are heated, tilt down slightly when the vehicle is put in reverse and have side marker lights.
"Go up either one," a guard wearing an eye patch made entirely of masking tape told me, and I proceeded up the left staircase and through a series of ornate rooms decorated with silk wallpaper and gilded mirrors and portraits of the thick-faced, ogreish Bourbons.
Or do mirrored landscape portraits represent ideal versions of the world?
An ornately framed mirror bears a portrait of a long-ago sultan.
