Accession # 1989.0022
Are you looking forward to Wilton’s exhibit on love and courtship since the eighteenth-century? To peak your interest, this week’s object from the collection is a finely carved, ivory Chinoiserie fan. Chinoiserie [sheen-wah-zuh-ree] is a French term used to describe European objects that reflect Chinese artistic themes. This fan is decorated with paintings of Oriental scenes and animals and carvings of birds, vines, and flowers. Although this fan was made in the nineteenth century, its style reflects a trend that first became wildly popular two centuries prior.
During the seventeenth century, fans became popular all over Europe as a women’s accessory; however, they were expensive and considered a high status, exotic item. Like highly valued porcelain, these fans were imported from the East.
The fad for fans only increased in the eighteenth century. These fans, imported to Great Britain from China by the East India Company, reflect the modes of trade and fashion at the time. What was once exotic and rare in the seventeenth century became a widely produced commodity for wealthy, fashionable women. Like Chinese export porcelain and more economical British Wedgewood ceramics, the finest fans were made of ivory and less expensive versions were constructed of bone. Surviving examples demonstrate a variety of decorative themes from the earlier mentioned Chinoiserie to painted scenes from Greek mythology and current events. A well educated woman could use her fan as an invitation to discuss Virgil’s Aeneid or the British victory at the Battle of Porto Bello.
In the nineteenth century, the French fan maker Jean-Pierre Duvelleroy once again fueled the fashion for fans when he was appointed supplier for Queen Victoria. His London fashion house published a pamphlet instructing ladies in the “Language of the Fan.” For instance , the fan held in front of the face meant “Follow Me”, or the fan in front of the ear told a suitor to ”Go away.” Although there are no primary sources referencing a coded “language of the fan” before this brilliant marketing ploy that does not mean that women across the centuries did not wield their fans with a purpose beyond cooling themselves on a warm afternoon or in a crowded ballroom. Madame de Staël, the late eighteenth-century author and influential woman of her time, had the following to say about fans:
What graces does not a fan place at a woman’s disposal if she only knows how to use it properly! It waves, it flutters, it closes, it expands, it is raised or lowered according to circumstances. Oh! I will wager that in all the paraphernalia of the loveliest and best-dressed women in the world, there is no ornament with which she can produce so great an effect.
The fan from Wilton’s collection is monogrammed with the initials “GBD.” How do you think this lady flourished her fine fan?
Bibliography
Baumgarten, Linda, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, “Colonial Williamsburg ‘s Museum Collection of Historic Threads: Three Centuries of Clothing. “ Online Exhibit, 19 January 2012. < http://www.history.org/history/museums/clothingexhibit/index.cfm>
Tea in a Teacup, “The Language of the Fan: Myth or Fact?.” 2 July 2011. 19 January 2012. <http://teainateacup.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/the-language-of-the-fan-myth-or-fact>
Also see: The Fan Museum, Greenwich, http://www.thefanmuseum.org.uk/
Image credits:
http://www.history.org/history/museums/clothingexhibit/museum_accessories.cfm?section=femaleacc#7: CW Fan 1740-1775; China for export to west, Ivory, painted paper, metal and paste rivet
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/blogs/collections/2011/01/the_navy_and_the_nation_in_the.html: battle of porto bello
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