Early Modern Fans

Introduction

The word fan originally mean an instrument for moving the air, especially for separating grain from chaff, such as a winnowing fan, it is only much later that it indicates a fashionable accessory. Fans came in two types, fixed and folding.

Figure 1: Miniature of Catherine de Medici by François Clouet. Victoria and Albert Museum

 

 The fixed fans were earlier and consisted of either a handle into which feathers, or something similar, could be inserted, as seen in the 1555 portrait of Catherine de Medici, [Figure 1], or a solid fan on a handle, sometimes called flag fan. A very few flag fans do appear in images in the middle ages, for example that carried by an attendant in the painting The Birth of Mary from  1342. The folding fan does not appear in Europe until relatively late, sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, as can be seen in Moroni’s Portrait of a young woman holding a fan, which dates to between 1560-78.[Figure 5] Fans start to be a fashionable accessory in the sixteenth century.

 Flag or screen fans

Because they are solid on a handle, flag fans sometimes appear in museum records as hand screens, which may be something they were used for. They seem to have been popular in Italy, Titian’s Lady in White holds a flag fan in her hand. Some of the images on these fans are taken from mythology, for example a c.1600 example in the Fan Museum collection, depicting a satyr unveiling Venus on one side, and Cupid trapping birds on the other. The images are taken from an engraving by Flemish printmaker, Raphael Sadeler (1560-1628). The Metropolitan Museum in New York has an embroidered flag fan from the first quarter of the seventeenth century. [Figure 2] A screen fan is purchased by Rachel, Countess of Bath, in 1647, “for a fair laced scarf and hood & 2 pair of pearl pendants & a screen fan £3”; however after this they seem to disappear from the records. (1 p. 264)

Figure 2: Hand screen or flag fan. 1600-25. Metropolitan Museum.

 Fans with handles

Several fan handles survive, such as one that dates from 1550 and is in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection. [Figure 3] There are items in the Cheapside Hoard that have been identified as either fan handles, or aigrettes for holding feathers in headdresses. (2 pp. 158-9) One of these is a gold and enamel handle set with twenty two garnets. Shakespeare in the Merry Wives of Windsor has Falstaff say, “And when Mrs. Bridget lost the handle of her fan, I took't upon mine honour thou hadst it not," and Pistol chimes in with, “Didst thou not share? Hadst thou not fifteen pence?” (Act 2 scene 2) While Bridget’s fan handle appears to be worth two shillings and sixpence, handles could be much more expensive and appear in the Middlesex Sessions records when they are stolen. In 1608, Henry Cuttes, a merchant tailor, had “a silver handle for a fan worth thirteen shillings and four pence” stolen from him, and in following year Sir Richard Griffin had another “silver handle for a fanne worth six shillings and eightpence” stolen. (3 pp. 33-58) In 1633 the Howards of Naworth purchased, “a black fann with a silver handle for my ladie 8s 3d.” (4 p. 296)    

Figure 3: Fan handle. c.1550. Victoria and Albert Museum

   

These fan handles were often filled with feathers. Cotgrave remarked in 1611, “The feathers of their (the ostriches) wings and tailes, but especially of their tailes, are very soft and fine ; in respect whereof they are much used in the fannes of gentlewomen.” (5) Feather fans are often seen in portraits, where they appear to be a symbol of status. Elizabeth I appears carrying a fan in several portraits, and several of these fans are listed in the Stowe inventory of her clothing. A National Portrait Gallery painting of c.1575 shows her carrying a fan handle with short feathers in various colours. In the Stowe inventory are references to fans of black feathers, carnation, white and orange feathers, one is described as having painted feathers, and one of “feathers of the Birde of Paradise and other colored feathers.” (6)

A 1580s portrait in the Royal Collection shows Elizabeth carrying a fan with black and white feathers. [Figure 4] A slightly later portrait in the NPG, from 1585-90, shows her with a heavily jewelled handle with long, possibly ostrich, feathers. One of the most elaborate in the Stowe inventory was “one fanne of white feathers with a handle of golde garnished with fower faire diamonds twoe faire rubies, twoe small diamonds and seaven rocke rubies and one emerode”; it was kept in a case of black velvet. (6)

Figure 4: Elizabeth I. 1580s. Royal Collections Trust.

Some fans had an integral mirror. The poet Richard Lovelace (1617-57) wrote an entire poem to “Lucasta's Fanne, With a Looking glasse in it,” describing a fan with ostrich feathers, a rich enamelled handle with sapphires, amethysts and opals, and set with a “crystal mirror.”

Folding fans

Folding fans consist of sticks and, except for brise fans, a fan leaf.

Figure 5: Detail from Moroni, Portrait of a Young Girl Holding a Fan. 1560-78. Rijksmuseum.

Brise fans

Brise fans are folding fans where the sticks themselves form the fan. There is a1620s example in the Victoria and Albert Museum, it is described as “cut straw applied to silk covered cardboard, reinforced with metal rods, decorated with gold paper and silk.”   Often these have a ribbon that runs through the top of the fan to limit the opening, though in the V&A fan it is nearer the bottom. [Figure 6]

Figure 6: Brise Fan. 1620s. Victoria and Albert Museum

Fan sticks

The sticks themselves including the outmost sticks, which are known as guards because they protect the fan leaf when the fan is shut, could be made from ivory, wood, or any other material that can be carved, painted, or otherwise decorated. There are some fans that are a half way house between brise and folding, where the sticks are heavily decorated and form a large proportion of the fan.

With early folding fans the sticks are held together at the pivot with a cord or a ribbon, rather than a rivet. There is an early fan of this type, c.1590-1630, in the Fan Museum in London, the sticks are ivory and the fan leaf is silk heavily embroidered in a scrolling pattern, the outer edge has metallic bobbin lace trim.

Fan leaf materials

The fan leaf can be made from vellum, chicken skin, silk, or paper, anything that can be decorated, folded and attached to the sticks. Mica, a translucent silicate mineral, could also be inserted in fan leaves, though there are few survivals; the Fitzwilliam Museum has an example dating to the second half of the seventeenth century. The  Musee de la Renaissance, Ecouen, France has a c. 1580 example of vellum and mica. Another of these fans, this one possibly Dutch, is in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, but most of its mica inserts are missing. 

The images on fan leaves

While early folding fans often have non- representational images, for example there is a superb example of a folding decoupe fan dating from 1590-1600 in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which looks like lace, but is actually cut skin, they soon started to depict subjects, especially classical subjects.  The engraver Abraham Bosse produced several fan leaves of classical subjects in the 1630s, which is discussed in an earlier blogpost. The Judgement of Paris and the Toilette of Venus were two very common subjects, as with this 1670s example in the Victoria and Albert Museum. [Figure 7] Later in the seventeenth century there were commemorative fan leaves. The Fan Museum has one dating from around 1660 which commemorates the Restoration of Charles II. In France when Marshal General of France, Turenne died in battle in 1675, a fan was produced, and an unmounted leaf is in the Fan Museum. (7) The Museum of London has an unmounted fan leaf from 1686 which depicts the Chariot of the Virgin Queen in the Lord Mayor Procession of that year. [Figure 8]

 

Figure 7: Folding fan depicting the Toilette of Venus. 1670s. Victoria and Albert Museum.

Who owned fans

Early fans of all types are almost always associated with royalty and nobility, White wrote of women at the end of the sixteenth century having servants to carry their accessories, “If their Mistres ryde abrode, she must have 6 or 8 Servingmen to attende her, she must have one to carrie her Cloake and Hood, least it raine, an other her Fanne, if she use it not her selfe.” (8)  Fans were not always for women, John Aubrey wrote, “Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice, rode the circuit with just such a fan; Mr Dugdale sawe it, who told me of it. The Earl of Manchester used also a fan.” (9 p. 17)

Figure 8: Unmounted fan leaf depicting the Lord Mayor's Procession 1686. London Museum.

 

Between the twenty six plates of Englishwomen in Wenceslaus Hollar’s Ornatus Muliebris of 1640, and the English figures in his Theatrum Mulierum and Aula Veneris of c.1644, there are nine women carrying fixed fans, and five carrying folding fans. Fans start to filter down society over the century, Helene Alexander considered that the fixed fan became associated more with the bourgeoisie, while the folding fan was associated with upper classes. (10) While most of Hollar’s fan carriers are described as noble women or gentlewomen he also has the Lord Mayor of London’s wife carrying a fixed fan, and a merchant’s daughter has another hanging at her waist. Fans seemed to have reached the middling sort. In 1634 Ann Baker, widow of rector had “two muffes and a fann 10s” in her probate inventory. (11 p. 61) Elizabeth Pepys did not want her husband to know she had bought a fan, Samuel wrote in his diary, “she having a mind to go into Fenchurch Street ... she afterwards told me it was to buy a fan that she had not a mind that I should know of.” (12 p. 4th June 1663)     

By the 1670s fans were appearing in the stock of provincial merchants. In 1679 Henry Mitchell, a haberdasher of Lincoln, had in stock several fans at one shilling and two shillings each. (13 p. 59) In 1687 Margaret Justice, a widow who was trading as a mercer in Shropshire, had in stock fans that were only eight pence each. (14 p. 279) By the end of the Stuart period a Rochester merchant, Edward Sackley, had in stock women’s fans at 6d each, but also children’s fans at 4d each, and better quality ivory fans at 2s and 3s each. (15 p. 221)

References

1. Gray, Todd. Devon Household Accounts 1627-59. Part 2 . Exeter : Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, vol. 39, 1996.

2. Forsyth, Hazel. The Cheapside Hoard: London's Lost Jewels. London : Philip Wilson fot the Museum of London, 2013.

3. Middlesex County Record Society. Middlesex County Records: Volume 2, 1603-25. London : Middlesex County Record Society, 1887. Available at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/middx-county Available at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/middx-county-records/vol2/pp33-47.

4. Ornsby, G. ed. Selections from the Household Books of the Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle. Publications of the Surtees Society. 1878, Vol. 68.

5. Croyat, Thomas. Coryat's Crudities: Hastily gobled up in Five Moneth's Travels. London : W.S., 1611.

6. Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd. Leeds : Maney, 1988.

7. A battle for heats and minds: Turenne and Louis XIV. Stone, Harriet. 2014, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Volume 36, Issue 1, pp. 73-83.

8. White, W. A health to the gentlemanly profession of seruingmen; or, The seruingmans comforts. London : W.W., 1598.

9. Aubrey, John. Wiltshire. The topographical collections of John Aubrey, 1659-70. Corrected and enlarged by John Edward Jackson. Devizes : Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1862.

10. Alexander, Hélène. Fans. London : Batsford, 1984.

11. Groves, J. Ed. Ashton and Sale wills: wills and probate inventories from two Cheshire townships, part 1, 1600-1650 . Sale : Northern Writers Advisory Services, 1999.

12. Pepys, Samuel. Diary. [Online] https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary.

13. Johnston, J. A. Probate inventories of Lincoln citizens 1661-1714. Woodbridge : Boydell, for the Lincoln Record Society, 1991.

14. Trinder, B. and Cox, J. . Yeoman & Colliers in Telford: Probate Inventories for Wellington, Wrockwardine, Lilleshall and Dawley, 1660-1750. . London : Phillimore, 1980.

15. Spufford, Margaret. The great reclothing of rural England: petty chapman and their wares in the seventeenth century. London : Hambledon Press, 1984.