COMPETITIVE FANS.
THE stately and splendid saloon of the Drapers' Hall is a happily appropriate scene for the exhibition of articles of art and luxury. The hall is a beautiful sight in itself, with its fair proportions, its lofty ceiling, its fine historical portraits, its golden legend of religion and loyalty written between its pillars and its roof, its general aspect of harmonious colouring, and rich- ness of ornamental detail. There is colour everywhere, but nowhere glare ; nothing to clash with the delicate beauty of the objects in the spacious glass-cases that occupy the centre of the hall, or are set against the walls, with a background of mirrors, roses, and flowering shrubs. It is an exhibition, so to speak, in Court dress, and Queen Anne (in whose reign the Fan Makers' Company was incorporated), portly, gracious, and observant, in her portrait in its niche, seems to preside over the collection, which includes a fan that once was fluttered by her own pretty, plump hand, and may very likely have tapped its emphasis to the confidences of Mrs. Morley with Mrs. Freeman. The historical fans have the peculiar interest that attaches to the personal belongings of the illustrious dead ; the slight, perishable, beautiful objects that have survived the great wrecks of time, and are associated with the long-quenched brilliancy of lives that had many, and some of them very dark, sides. The Crown Perfumery Com- pany exhibit in Class 4 (" Ancient European ") a fan which belonged to Madame de Pompadour. It is a fine painting on vellum of some now-forgotten incident of Italian history, by Pietro de Cortona, and is mounted on panel. In the same case is a fan which belonged to Marie Antoinette, a fragile, elaborate, beautiful thing, with five medallions painted on China silk, and with minute work in gold thread and spangles, mounted in carved ivory. It was purchased from the Exposition Universelle, and contrary to the usual custom, the purchasers have been allowed to take it away. How do such things survive ? Who saved them, where weie they hidden from the great destruction ? In Mr. Julius Franks's collection there are two fans, of elaborate workmanship, whose subject is Marie Leczinska. One is entirely the work of Boucher ; its subject is the betrothal of the Princess with the " well-beloved " young king. Nothing can exceed the beauty, the delicacy, and the richness of the painting. The fan was the Queen's, and we may sup- pose she bated it, for its ironical mockery of her fate. The other is an imitation of Chinese art ; the ivory " brins " beauti- fully carved, the centre painted with a portrait of Queen Marie Leczineka, of marvellous delicacy and expression. The fashion of that and later times that people should carry their own portraits about with them on fans, snuff-boxes, and brooches seems very bad taste to us now, but it is not more absurd than the present use of names or initials. Here are fans with feminine names upon them in letters an inch long, with initials hung like a clown's hoops over branches of fruit-trees, or sprays of flowers, ugly and senseless devices, which, in some instances, spoil designs that are otherwise pretty. Mr. Franks's collection has considerable interest, in addition to the two Lonis-Quinze fans, for it illustrates the succeeding eras in the history of France, by a paper-leaf fan, with engraved portraits of the Comte d'Artois and the Prince de Conde; and by one of perforated wood, mounted with portraits of Louis Seize and Necker, and in an oval, a figure of Liberty, with Fame proclaiming the fall of the Bastille. All subjects of this kind seem to us unsuitable to the idea and meaning of a fan, in either its useful or its ornamental application ; and still more so are the subjects of two very valuable Flemish specimens, of the seventeenth century. A lady fanning herself in the intervals of a dance, or accentuating a flirtation with a representation of the Israelites after their deliverance from Pharaoh, complicated by figures of Bellona and Minerva, and by trophies of war ; or worse still, by a painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes, presents about as incongruous an idea as that of a dining-room with which we are acquainted, where a study of raw meat on one wall bangs opposite to a picture of Saint John the Baptist's head on a dish, with the blood dripping over the edge, on the other, and just above the side-board. No fineness of workmanship or richness of material makes up for the jarring sense of incongruity in objects which ought to combine art, utility, and something of the poetical in idea and design ; and we feel this so much about fans that, in many instances, their grandeur and elaboration are almost vexatious, especially in the case of the painted fans, where the designs are heavy or crowded. To the " dress " fans, composed of fairylike lace and gold-encrusted mother-of-pearl, or gemmed tortoise-shell, there is no such ob- jection to be made, for they are articles of parade, merely beau- tiful things to be looked at—the "bright poker" principle applied to costume—but the fans that are intended to be used ought surely to be designed with some sort of har- mony between themselves and their purpose. In many of those exhibited we find this harmony admirably sustained, but in others it has no existence. To architectural designs we absolutely object ; Windsor Castle, the Paris Opera House, St. Peter's at Rome, the Pantheon, all these designs are out of place, however well executed. The image of heavy stone buildings waving slowly or quickly through the air is an absurd one. Only one exception presents itself ; it is Mr. Henley's Esmeralda fan, on which the gipsy is dancing on the Place de Gre.ve at night. In this instance the facade of Notre Dame is necessary to the mean- ing of the design ; but even so, we prefer the companion fan, which shows us Djali capering to the music of his mistress's tambourine. Assyrian and Egyptian antiquities also, and the re- petition of the willow pattern, however well done, together with designs which suggest the decoration of the stanze and the loggia of the Vatican, and though perhaps Raphaelesque, have no mean- ing whatsoever when detached from their original surroundings, are also, to our mind, misplaced. Certain pictorial scenes, though very elaborate, are quite appropriate ; as for instance, the "Manage sous Charles IX.," painted on skin by Edward Moreau, and the "Manage sous Louis XV.," painted on skin by Lasellez. The mingled grandeur, grace, and festivity of these subjects, and the beauty of their execution, render them conspicuous among the collection. For the magnificent objects exhibited by Messrs. Hancock, forming a suite of fan, bouquet-bolder, and smelling-bottle, in gold, diamonds, pearl, and torquoise, there is nothing but admiration possible ; but they are jewellery, not art, they are splendid, not interesting. M. Duvelleroy's tortoise- shell fan-stick, with its beautiful diamond wheat-ears, is another instance of mere magnificence ; and a splendid Italian specimen, richly jewelled, which is among the Marchioness of Bristol's col- lection, has in the handle a useless little watch, which must inevitably have been put out of order, if the fan were ever to be used.
The mountings are of various kinds and degrees of merit, but they are all more or less familiar to us, and none of them are done in England. Mother-of-pearl is the material most used, and this exhibition enables us to estimate its variety, and the perfection to which its treatment has been brought ; for here we find innumerable fans mounted in thick white nacre, —in the opaline kind, technically called " burgos ; " in the Oriental or waved, which is susceptible of beautiful ornamentation and of the black (commonly called smoked) kind. Tortoise-shell, ivory —the French carving being almost equal to the Chinese in intri- cacy, and possessing a softness quite its own—precious woods and precious metals, in an endless variety of applications, form the mountings, which, especially in the Crown Perfumery Company's case of lace fans, are of singular beauty, harmonising perfectly with the dainty fabrics stretched upon them. The materials upon which the paintings are executed are vellum, white kid, white, black, and tinted silks and satins, batiste, and paper. Silks manufactured for the purposes of fan-painting are rolled in the piece, not folded, so that creases are avoided ; and they undergo some additional process, called, we believe, " colandering." A French manufacturer has recently patented a silk in which blue and white, and pink and white tints are combined after a wonder- ful fashion, the one melting into the other. There is no specimen of this silk in the exhibition, but a beautifully painted fan, partly pink, partly blue, is exhibited by the Crown Perfumery Company, in which the silk and satin is imperceptibly joined, and which shows what is the effect of colour to be produced by the newly-invented combination. Against the employment of feathers as materials for fans, Mr. Sala protests, in his introduction to the catalogue, and all that he says is borne out by an inspection of the show. If there were no other argument against feathers in this applica- tion, the observaeon that they suggest heat, not coolness, would be a sufficient one. But in addition, they are not beautiful, so used.
The practical interest of the exhibition, as showing what English artists are doing in this long-neglected branch of Art, centres in the paintings and drawings, which are seen to most advantage in the unmounted specimens. Groups from poems or fictions world-widely known, scenes from fairy lore or fable, illustrations of fruit, flower, tree, plant, bird and insect life, pretty little love stories, such are the most pleasing subjects of the numerous works by English artists. " Faust " and " Un- dine," " Macbeth and 44 Hiawatha," "The School for Scandal" and" Gammer Grethel," "Tom Thumb" and "Cinderella," meet instant recognition from us here. Of these subjects, Miss Loch's two renderings of the charming story of the " Goose-girl" (in Section II., Nos. 121, 122), and Mr. Nash's " Cinderella " (Sec- tion H., No. 258), please us most. No. 121 is a delicious bit of colour, and also of humour ; the details are all admirable ; the wild flowers in the foreground and on the tree-trunk, the paternal castle in the clear distance, the flock of geese, every one of them a character, and yet a perfect goose ; from the self-important straddler (they straddle, they don't waddle, which proves Miss Loch's accuracy of observation), complaining to the outcast princess of the bad manners of the male intruder who is cracking his whip in the distance, to the sentimental bird on the outskirts of the group, who is still only a gosling, and given presumably to a green-and-yellow melancholy ; and they lead up to the figure if the Goose-girl with artistic effect. The blue is delightful, so is the white, so are the humour and the feeling of the design. The second illustration is more elaborate, and though much more difficult, it is perhaps hardly so charming. It is, however, a triumph of skill in design, for here is the stiff, chill, old German town, with its roofs and turrets and its ancient gateway and steep "green," along which the geese are straddling home ; the leaders having nearly reached the lofty archway, under which every one of them will stoop his foolish neck, as the Goose-girl, so slim and graceful in her green gown, stands and listens to the rhyming oracle of the enchanted horse's head on one side of the gate, while the ancient sun-dial on the other shows the shadow of evening. Mr. Nash's Cinderella is in grey and white, on plain black silk ; beautifully drawn, and very humorous. Cinderella has dreamed her dream and danced her dance, and has gone back to her distaff and her duffle petticoats. Very pretty are her pen- sive head and round arms and dainty little feet, and full of grace and humour is the pumpkin-carriage, with its team of mice, its rat-coachman, in a mighty hurry and clacking his whip, and its frog-footman, with the light-bearing wand, all scuttling away to the fairy stables,—a capital fan for a chaperon, with its merry moral anent late hours, and one that ought to be de rigueur for the new-fashioned Cinderella dances. In the same section are several unmounted fans, shown by Mr. Henley, the only provincial exhibitor, which speak well for talent and taste in Liverpool. "After the Masked Ball," is an admirable piece of work,—not a murder or a duel, but merely a merry party driving off in a hackney coach, their gaiety and keeping-up of the spirit of the ball being amusingly contrasted by the penaud air of the coach- man, who has passed the night out in the cold. Passing on to the simpler designs, we find that Miss Loch exhibits six ' other fans, in addition to her Goose-girl illustrations. Among them is one painted for the Queen, and called "Brambles." This is, to our mind, the most beautiful fan in the collection, regarded as a work of art ; and in its simple, wild, breezy sweet- ness there is poetical appropriateness. The painting is an ex- quisite bit of hedge-tangle ; with its slender twigs, its many-tinted, sharp-edged leaves, while its cool, rich berries might be the very "bonny bunch of blackberries" of the old nursery story, in which there occurs the entirely unreasonable connection between the old woman's eating them, and her goat's going over the bridge, so satisfactory to remember, when the inevitable age of accounting for things has arrived. The harmony and beauty of this work conceal its difficulty, which must, however, have been great, in the giving of such freedom, grace, and lightness to the design, while preserving the obligatory curve of the fan-shape. Two studies of cranes, one after nature, the other after the Japanese manner, also by Miss Loch, are striking. The former, painted as a mourning fan for Madame Van de Weyer, is the more beautiful, and is the handsomest mourning fan in the collection. Next to it comes a fan mounted in carved ebony (Class 2, No. 601), with a design called "Winter," mistily and delicately beautiful. It would be difficult to choose between Miss Loch's " Seagulls," with the Hebrides in the distance, and her "Wild Duck." Now one thinks the swaying, clanging sea-birds, with the stretch of sea, so serene and lovely in the evening, would be the pleasantest possession, a lovely fan for out-door use; and then the bold, sharp drawing of the brown reeds against the yellowing sky, and the settling-down of the ducks in their sedgy mere, make one waver towards the other. Many of the flower paintings are very beautiful, but there are more stiff and common-place designs among them than in the other kinds. An unmounted fan, "Daisies," of the Marguerite kind, by Miss Capes (No. 154), is perhaps the best example of flower " treatment " in the collection ; the natural stiffness of the flowers is admirably taken advantage of in the arrangement. In Class L, Section 1, in a case full of splendid fans, triumphs of mounting and jewellery, which have their own special interest, but not of the kind with which we are at present concerned, is a set of fans, with a scent-bottle in the handle of each, exhibited by Mr. T. 0. Jones, one of which (No. 86) is of quite extraordinary beauty. The design is a rich spray of fruit-blossom, on black satin, with two exquisite blue Australian birds, the one pecking, the other perched. We hardly think the real plumage can much exceed in lustre and in softness this marvellous imitation of it.
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