Mirror #9 (C.114) closes the series with an oval divided into three distinct vertical zones — black on the left taking the larger portion, a deep red strip in the centre, Ben-Day dot patterning on the right — a small yellow element catching the upper edge, the whole surface rendered in a palette that is the most dramatically tonal since Mirror #4. The oval format returns the series to the rounded disc after the rectangular departures, the curved boundary of the mirror re-establishing the object as something contained within its own shape.

By the final work, the viewer had spent the series learning to read the conventions Lichtenstein was deploying — the dot field as the sign of glass, the coloured arc as the sign of reflection, the outlined boundary as the sign of a frame — and Mirror #9 (C.114) addressed that accumulated knowledge directly, using the simplest elements to produce a work whose legibility depended entirely on everything that had preceded it. The black and red zones said nothing about mirrors on their own; they required the series' vocabulary, built up across eight preceding works, to function as a picture of one.

The Mirror Series had been, from the first print, an investigation into representation — conducted through an object chosen precisely because it raised those conditions most acutely. Roy Lichtenstein ended it not with a resolution but with a restatement: the same marks, the same refusal to show what the mirror was supposed to show, and the same insistence that those marks were nonetheless, unmistakably, a picture of a mirror.

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