Eventail

The five fans from the present collection form an unusually varied selection of the popular éventails which artists such as Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir undertook in response to the increasing fashion of fans as well as the exotic japonisme with which they were associated. Beginning in the late 1860s--Edgar Degas created his first fan in 1869, Paul Gauguin in 1884 (see Evening Sale lot 8)--Impressionist painters ascribed style and grace to these objects, appearing in their compositions (e.g. Manet's La dame aux éventails, Rouart and Wildenstein no. 208; Musée du Louvre, Paris), and becoming decorated objects in their own right. In 1880, Gazette des beaux-arts critic Arthur Baignières would write of "une épidémie d'éventails"--by 1891, "the combined total of folding and rigid fans exported from Japan was 15,724,048" (Dr. A. Mackrell, Art and Fashion, London, 2005, p. 95). The present examples--floral and feminine in subject--elegantly balance japoniste influence with traditional Impressionist motifs.