The Regency/Romantic era fashions in the V&A Museum included, along with the turban and fan I showed you a while ago, this rather more elaborate fan. As you can see (and probably see better if you enlarge the image at the V&A collections website, it’s quite elaborate, with three entire scenes painted with gouache, and the gilded, lacy sticks. The museum classifies this as Gothic Revival—and I’ve noticed that the Gothic seems to be revived rather frequently, in architecture and fashion, right up to our own time. The museum explains also that the fan sticks "were further embellished with crocketing - small projections along the points - inspired by the gables and spires of Gothic churches.”
Dated between 1820-1840, it does strike me as the sort of accessory I’d expect post-Regency, when fashions started becoming more ornate and showy. Certainly I have no trouble imagining one of my 1830s characters wielding such a fan, while one of my Regency ladies would be more likely to be
fluttering something like the one in my earlier blog post, shown here at right. This one, too, can be enlarged and examined in more detail at the V&A website here. Photographs courtesy me.
Please click on the images to enlarge.
One of us -- 
2 comments:
I am quite happy to accept that the fan sticks, embellished by the small projections along the points, were inspired by the gables and spires of Gothic churches. After all, Gothic Revival was appearing in architecture and every other art form.
But a fan was a functional object, as well as being decorative. So women either kept the open fan in their laps or watched those poking-out fan sticks very carefully!
I have a fan collection from the 19th century, and have been to the V & A, but somehow missed this one. It's extraordinary. I'm surprised that there aren't more like this, but perhaps they were discarded because the projections on the sticks proved too fragile. It's lovely, and I'm pleased that someone was careful enough with it that it survived intact.
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