Nature and Art, July 1, I860 - .] 
NOTES ON FANS. 
61 
specimen of the inspiration Sir Joshna would seem to have 
drawn from the contemplation of well-born loveliness ; and 
the boy’s picture, while rich in every other quality, displays 
infinitely more nerve than any of the great president’s 
works we can call to mind. 
There are a number of Sir Joshua’s family portraits — 
none of them unworthy of veneration and study — contri- 
buted from the Fane, Westmoreland, and Beaufort collections. 
The most imposing is the composition, or “ assembly,” as it 
was termed at the period, introducing Mr. Henry Fane, Mr. 
Inigo Jones, and Mr. Charles Blair — the two latter gentle- 
men guardians of the former — enjoying their wine alfresco. 
Here the hand of time has so regrettably injured parts of 
the work, that we find an additional reason for congratu- 
lating our Academicians of to-day on their decision — if 
decision may be inferred from their published suggestion — 
to take formally in hand the chemistry of pigments. 
Our reverence for our own great portrait-painter must 
not rob us of the pleasure of suggesting- that an hour or two 
may be worthily spent among the Flemish masters in the 
North Boom. Here we have a good specimen (an interior 
composition) of the three hundred known works of the serio- 
comic Jan Steen ; and a splendid one of Gerard Dow’s power 
over texture and still life, linked to a meaningless attitude 
of an insipid subject. In the “Wine-taster” of Mieris, a 
cabinet work in his own exquisite style, we seem to find the 
type of one of the modern German Hasenclever’s famous 
group. There is a good “Baggage Train” by Wouvermans ; 
a noble landscape, a grim and gloomy wooded gorge, by the 
monarch of Dutch landscape painters, Buisdael. A yet more 
imposing marine piece, by the same great hand, is the 
“ Harbour-mouth, with Vessels making for Shelter.” The 
passionate, chequered breakers, perturbed sky, and terror- 
stricken ships, are all in actual movement, and the crisis of 
the storm is so imminent that the spectator seems to await 
it with a sensation of anxiety. 
The Duke of Devonshire’s rustic mill embosomed in noble 
foliage, an ample landscape to the right, and a solidly-painted 
foreground, is in that manner of Buisdael which has had 
such an influence upon English landscape art. The “ Head 
of an Old Man,” by Denner, although a Chinese copy of a 
beard of two days’ growth may not be charming, is worth 
attention for its admirable rendering of the hair and com- 
plexion. A Masaccio portrait (said to be an Aldobrandini), 
lent by Lord Overstone, presents a figure of imposing 
gravity and force of tone ; and Jan de Mabuse is represented 
by. “A Merchant,” clearly a portrait, wonderfully executed 
and full of expression, albeit this is curiously associated 
with a face and brow of marble smoothness, exceeding in 
its delicacy the dreams of a Bachel, and unruffled by a line 
of thought or faint suspicion of a wrinkle. The power the 
portrait has is, of course, the more singular on this account ; 
and, in a somewhat less degree, the same remark may apply 
to the Aldobrandini picture. The downward flight of a full- 
robed angel, by Masaccio (belonging to Lord Somers), is 
very excellently represented ; but one foot seems unfortu- 
nately out of drawing. In the same corner is a magnificent 
Canalletto “View in Borne” — an exhibition by itself. In 
the Middle Boom a remarkable portrait by an artist named 
Lutliihuys must arrest every spectator’s attention, and is 
worthy of study : and those who associate the name of 
George Morland with not unrepulsive pigstyes and villeinage 
only, will do well to pause before his minutely-finished and 
very pleasing morceaM, “ Girl caressing a Dove.” 
Large as is the force and number of the foreign masters 
in this year’s exhibition, England need not blush for her 
own sons, who not unworthily represent her. The purity 
of Crome’s air, the lightness of his clouds, his mastery over 
the sombre and the luminous, is displayed in several of his 
works lent by Mr. Fuller Maitland and Mr. Wynn Ellis, 
which may stand at no disadvantage side by side with those 
qualities of the ancients. Dyce’s “Virgin and Child,” 
painted almost in our own day, is a splendid example of 
colour and flesh-painting, with perhaps a thought too much 
nerve in the holy infant’s plumpness of muscle. We might 
ramble on, however, beyond the limit of our readers’ patience 
were we to catalogue even all the beauties — without glancing 
at defects — in these rooms ; so, praying the attention of all 
for whom infancy has a charm to Sir Joshua Beynolds’s 
exquisite child-portraits (162 and 110) — to all mothers the 
gems of the exhibition — we must quit this pleasant place 
and interesting subject. 
NOTES 0 
W E are glad to offer to our fair readers a chromo- 
lithograph and description (kindly placed at our 
service by Mr. W. J. Thomas, of 136, Oxford Street, one of 
the leading court jewellers in Europe), of a fan presented by 
the Princess Marie, Duchess of Hamilton, to Her Boyal 
Highness the Princess Mary on the occasion of her marriage. 
The sides are of pierced gold arabesque work, enriched with 
H. B. Highness’s monograms and crown in diamonds, rubies, 
and emeralds. The meshes are of fine carved mother-of- 
pearl, richly inlaid with wreaths of flowers in pure gold ; 
the monogram and coronet carved on the centre one. The 
body is of the finest Brussels lace expressly designed, and 
the workmanship, as well as the lace of the (unjewelled) 
fac simile now before us, is truly exquisite. To these par- 
ticulars we take the opportunity of adding a little fan- 
gossip, which we hope may not prove uninteresting. To 
begin in the true encyclopaedical style — though, by the 
way, as will be found on reference, the subject has not 
been found worth the attention of the encyclopedists — ■ 
we have collected the following etymology of the word from 
the best authorities. 
Fan. Anglo-Saxon, Fann ; German and Dutch, Wanne ; 
Italian, Vanno; French, Fventail; Spanish, Abanico; Latin, 
Vannus, derived (says one) from the Greek [3a\\eti> 7 meaning 
to “winnow, cast, or throw lightly into air.” # 
* A very rare — perhaps unique — book exists in the 
Archieopiscopal library at Lambeth, dated 1578, and called 
“ The Fanne of the Faithful.” 
N FANS. 
Certainly our Fan was never invented in a cold country. 
It must have been born with the sun, and have travelled 
westward. It has been copied from Egyptian tombs and 
temples, by Mr. Owen Jones, into his beautiful “Grammar of 
Ornament.” (Chap. III. Plate 5. Figs. 1, 4, 5, and 6.) It 
has turned up recently in Assyrian investigations. It may 
be tracked through all the painted records of Hindostan 
and Persia. China and Japan are full of it. Its most 
monstrous forms (if we except the huge steam screw-blades, 
now technically called fans) are the Indian Punkah, and 
the leaves of the Ceylon Palm, a Borassus Flabelliformis 
This precious tree, on which Sir Emerson Tennent thinks 
fully one-fourth of the population of the northern division 
of that island depend for sustenance, provides them with 
food, oil, wine, sugar, building-poles, roofs, fences, baskets, 
mats, books, and lastly Fans. But not from the East did 
the fan of society reach Britain. We owe it — according 
to the bulk of authority — to France. Steevens places its 
arrival in the reign of Henry VIII. Stow says that masks, 
muffs, fans, and false hair for women, were devised in Italy, 
and brought to England from France in 1572. That being- 
the year of the Huguenot massacre, and of the supremacy 
in France of Catherine de Medici and her Italian follow- 
ing, it is, perhaps, not very odd that Stow should have 
fixed upon it for the invasion of England, by what he would 
have termed a pestilence of their Italian novelties. Once 
planted, the exotic throve apace, for in“ Love’s Labour Lost,” 
written about 1594, we find Don Armado, “ a fantastical 
Spaniard,” rallied for taking upon himself the office of a 
