Corsham Court was bought for Paul Methuen (1723-1795) in 1745. By 1747 Methuen took possession of the estate, and it was not long before he decided to remodel the house. Around 1757 Paul inherited his uncle, Sir Paul Methuen's (1672-1757) collection of Old Masters, including Van Dyck's Betrayal of Christ, Rubens' Wolf and Fox Hunt, and further works by Strozzi, Murillo, and Reni. Methuen immediately began aggrandising Corsham to accommodate his uncle's collection. In 1760 Capability Brown was invited to Corsham as the preeminent architect and landscape gardener of his time. Brown clearly proved himself capable, as around 1761 Metheun formally commissioned him to enlarge and improve the house and its gardens. The present mirror is almost certainly an important survival from this period: the underlying Queen Anne pier glass possibly original to the house when bought in 1745, and the George III border added during the period of improvement circa 1760.

Brown planned to integrate his designs for proposed Picture Gallery with the existing Elizabeth plan, preserving the character of the building and the Elizabeth South Front, and proposed doubling the bay windows of the projecting winds, with the Picture Gallery and Cabinet Room extending the full length of the enlarged East Wing's ground floor.

Central to Brown's plans were the integration of his designs with the building's Elizabethan history. A similar approach was taken with the present mirror, anachronistically adding a resplendent George III border, decorated with scrolling foliage, and floral and berried sprays, to a more restrained Queen Anne pier glass. Indeed, the arched, divided and bevelled Queen Anne mirror, with its slim mirrored border exemplifies the style of the 1720s, and a similar mirror was installed in the Lady's Drawing Room at Chicheley Hall (ill. A. Bowett, Early Georgian Furniture, 1715-1740, 2009, p. 293, pl. 6:53). With this in mind, the present mirror is a remarkable palimpsest, much like Corsham Court itself, the layers of style and history visible in a single object.