What is best about the painting is the suggestion of the feminine form in the lower part of the right-hand figure. The abundance of the lower back and buttocks is heightened by the fact that the shape tapers up to a point and by the suggestion of roundness and softness given by the green hoops. And tension and power is generated by making the shadow between the buttocks resemble female genitals and by turning the breasts round towards us. But most important is the expressive use of line. It is not new. In "Woman in an Armchair" of 1929 we saw a jagged, unrealistic use of line to portray something like narrow-mindedness or anger. Here the line is again not merely a way of delimiting an object in space, but, and this is the artistic paradox, it is used as a means of artistic expression in itself. This form of expression reaches its height in a painting which ranks with the reclining Venuses of Georgiana and Titian and Velasquez. In "The Mirror" Picasso uses these thick, overpowering lines to convey, by contrast with the lightness of the flesh, a female body aflame with sensuousness. Yet the word "aflame" will not describe it. The painting contains no metaphor of fire. Those lines are their own description of sensuous abundance. Let us see what progress has been made since the "Woman in an Armchair". First, the mystifying blank picture has given way to a mirror, which has the advantage both of concentrating our attention on the subject of the work, the woman's body, and resolving the problem of the picture-space by bringing the foreground, the girl, and the background, the mirror, into a dynamic relationship. In fact, all the inessential features of the room, the wallpaper, the suggestion of a door, the armchair and the bath-robe, have been cleared out to make way for a simple, concentrated view of the woman's body and the mirror against a simplified wallpaper design: it is as if the "camera" had zoomed in for a close-up.