NOTES ON A STATUS SYMBOL

Favoured by pharaohs and current fashionistas, the fan has doubled as a cooling tool and miniature artwork for centuries. Jacob Moss, curator of The Fan Museum, celebrates its story, and debunks myths around it

‘It exercises the o ce of the zephyrs, and cools the glowing breast... It hides bad teeth, malicious smiles and frowns of discontent… in a word, it has a thousand admirable qualities and may justly be entitled one of the noblest inventions of the human mind.’ I like this description of the handheld fan, from The Grand Magazine in 1760. Functionality aside, fans touch on themes as broad as social history, art, design, fashion, ethnography and religion. The better-

Left: an Art Nouveau-style French fan, with mother of pearl sticks and painted silk leaf, c.1900–10 Below: an English example with ivory sticks, c.1760, painted with a view of Covent Garden market quality examples are genuine (although unheralded) works of art. Their history crosses the globe, extending thousands of years. Some of the earliest surviving examples were discovered in 1922, in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Of the eight beautifully crafted fans found alongside the pharaoh, it’s the so-called ‘golden fan’ that I find most alluring, despite its original crest of ostrich feathers having disintegrated. Richly coated in gold foil, the upper part depicts the pharaoh »

hunting ostrich. The discovery suggests that from an early point, fans functioned as potent symbols of status, prosperity and taste.

SNAILS AND JEWELS Across the Mediterranean, from Africa and into Europe, the story of the fan gathers pace in the 16th century. Fans were on the Continent before this (archaeological finds date to the 4th century BC), but it’s in the 1500s that their transition from exotic novelty to indispensable costume accessory begins. Fixed fans with jewel-encrusted handles set with colourful, exotic plumes feature in paintings of Elizabeth I and her Continental counterparts. Also of the time is the Venetian ‘ventarolo’, or flag fan, a novel invention requiring only a gentle rotation of the wrist to set the ‘flag’ to spin and conjure cooling winds. Among The Fan Museum’s earliest treasures is a late-16thcentury flag fan, its silk-fringed screen painted with a juicy, albeit naive rendition of Venus unveiled by a lascivious satyr, who Cupid takes aim at in defence of his mother (see opposite).

It’s the story of the folding fan, thought to be a Japanese invention, that we connect with best. Introduced in Europe in the second half of the 16th century, folding fans combine practicality, showmanship and frivolity. Portraits of Elizabeth I feature them, either in the hand or attached to a ribbon suspended from the waistline of her wheel farthingale. The museum has one of the few surviving examples, its silk pleats delicately embroidered with scrolling vines and flowers; look closely and you’ll notice a snail winding its way along a tendril. Such fans (in general) were not made as works of art to display and admire, but were functional objects, often used and abused. That this should have survived intact for more than 400 years is miraculous.

Top left: spot the snail, embroidered on this fan from the 1590s

Above left: the ‘golden fan’ that was found in the tomb of Tutankhamen

Above right: man with a fan, the warrior Kiyomori Heishokoku by Yoshitoshi Taiso, c.1885

UNKNOWN MAKERS The fan’s journey from rarity to ubiquity reaches completion in the 18th century – when the craft of fan making in Europe attained brilliance. Due to its artisanal nature, contemporary accounts

of fan making are rare, but we know it was complicated, requiring many craftspeople.

The sticks were made by specialist carvers, jewellers and metalworkers, whose workmanship displays finesse and ingenuity, sometimes incorporating intricate silverwork, articulated figures and miniature timepieces. Held closed, as they often were, a fan could still facilitate a topic of conversation or attract glances of admiration or envy. The pleated leaves were by other artisans, including fan painters, whose talents and status varied from journeymen (and women) to highly skilled professionals. Working in

‘AS THE SOCIAL COMMENTATOR JOSEPH ADDISON SAID IN 1711, “WOMEN ARE ARMED WITH FANS AS MEN WITH SWORDS, AND SOMETIMES DO MORE EXECUTION WITH THEM” ’

Top left: a three- in-one fan based on the matryoska Russian doll concept, by Sylvain Le Guen, 2007

Above left: a detail of one of The Fan Museum’s earliest fans, featuring a satyr, Venus and Cupid

Above right: close up on the fine canepin leather leaf of a FrenchRussian fan of 1875, showing an 18th-centurystyle ball relative anonymity, these painters rarely signed or dated their work and were unjustly derided. The London Tradesman of 1747, for example, dismisses fan painting as a ‘trifling branch of the arts, which requires not great skill nor fancy to make a workman’.

In the 18th century fans with printed leaves (as opposed to painted) emerge. Produced in volume and at speed, they captured the market, according to one aggrieved fan painter, who, in 1751, noted that ‘Ladies of Quality down to Kitchen Maids’ were ‘pleasing themselves with the cheapness of their bargains’. Printed fans reflect the social and cultural mores of the time, their paper pleats engraved with topical subjects such as fashion satires, military propaganda, popular dances and parlour games. A well-known example from 1797, named ‘Fanology’ or the ‘Ladies Conversation Fan’, proposed a complex system of communication based on numerical and alphabetical values. If the aim were to converse unobserved then this code, which demanded its ‘speakers’ adopt unnatural postures and movements, would prove largely »

counterproductive. But it is with ‘Fanology’ and similar types of ‘speaking’ fans that the so-called ‘language of fans’ first takes root in public imagination.

FANS AS WEAPONS The notion of clandestine communication based solely on the positioning of a fan infers forbidden liaisons. There is, however, little evidence to suggest the language of fans was anything more than a mild amusement and, if practised at all, then only by a small number. What is certain is that women throughout history have artfully manipulated fans to display character and convey emotion. As the social commentator Joseph Addison said in 1711, ‘Women are armed with fans as men with swords, and sometimes do more execution with them.’

In the West, the popularity of fans declined post the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. They did not return to fashion until the 1850s, and then in spectacular manner. The era marked prosperity in Europe, particularly in France, where a revived aristocracy and rising class of aspirational entrepreneurs displayed position and wealth through material means. As fans reflect the tastes of their period, the best examples incorporated the finest Belgian lace, paintings by renowned artists and monogrammed sticks enriched with goldwork, guilloché enamelling and gemstones. Among The Fan Museum’s most ostentatious fans from the mid to late 19th century (the fan’s ‘second golden age’) are those by Maisons Fabergé and Alexandre. The latter,

OUR EXPERT’S STORY

Jacob Moss

Arts Society Accredited Lecturer

• Jacob gained a BA in fashion at Reading School of Art, then studied fashion curation at the London College of Fashion • As curator at The Fan Museum, he is involved in its 30th anniversary this year • Among his talks for The Arts Society are Seduced! Fans and the art of advertising and Painted pleats: a history of European fan painting

Top: Woman with a Fan, c.1879 by Renoir

Above: a 2017 fan by street artist Giacomo Bufarini/ RUN and Sylvain Le Guen established in 1849, furnished crowned heads of Europe with fans considered today to be among the finest decorative articles of their period. Fashion is capricious; the decline of the fan gathered pace in the early 20th century. In 2017, the Heritage Crafts Association categorised fan making as a critically endangered craft, at risk of no longer being practised in the UK. That same year The Fan Museum launched ‘Street Fans’, a pioneering project linking two disparate fields: street art and fan making. Working with fan maker Sylvain Le Guen, artists decorated fans with the same rebellious energy they devoted to making art in the streets. The results – 60 handcrafted folding fans – were exhibited, attracting record audiences. Fans are quietly returning to fashion, carried by models of all genders walking runways for top fashion houses. Makers such as Maison Duvelleroy (founded in 1827, relaunched in 2010) and Le Guen are spearheading the revival. Although the fan’s status has been usurped by other items – the handbag and sunglasses, which go for extravagant sums – could it be that a greater appreciation of the exquisite craft of fan making is coming?

SEE

The Fan Museum is in Greenwich, London; thefanmuseum.org.uk

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