I love these delicate hares. This is an incredible Irish mirror from 1760 with finely carved hoho birds and hares. At the moment it has 3 layers over the original gilding. One layer of bronze pigment, one layer of oil gilding and a further layer of water gilding. I am doing a test area of it to see what's left of the original and couldn't resist working on this lovely little animal. It's a work in progress so in the picture above I've got a further layer of gold to remove. It may seem crazy to scrape off so many layers of gold leaf, but once you see the incredible deftness of the carving and the subtle colour of the original gold, you just HAVE to keep stripping!
