Unfolding Pictures: Fans in the Royal Collection
Until May 29; The Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

In Edinburgh, it’s said, the single ladies used to collect together their fans at the start of the social season. Each bachelor would pick out a fan, winning its owner as his partner for the rest of the season. The flirtatious use of folding fans is legendary, allowing coy young ladies to convey their feelings to the objects of their affection, or of their disdain.

“Women are armed with fans as men with swords,” wrote Joseph Addison in the Spectator in 1711, “and sometimes do more execution with them.” If a woman opened her fan quickly, and then snapped it shut, it conveyed her displeasure. If she passed the fan from hand to hand, it meant she’d caught you eyeing up another woman.

If a woman looks closely at the picture on the fan, it means either that she likes you, or that she’s at the Queen’s Gallery enjoying the current exhibition of fans from the Royal Collection. The 82 fans range in date from a rare leather survivor of 1600, said to belong to Charles I, to an unfeasibly large construction of ostrich feathers given to Queen Elizabeth (The Queen Mother) on her coronation in 1937.

Perhaps in order to avoid any suggestion of impropriety on the part of the Royal family, there is little mention of the fan’s codified romantic role. As the catalogue says, “the particular interest of all these fans lies in their royal association.” This leaves the labels pretty dry for those who don’t care which Queen received which fan for which royal occasion.

Men – more often of the foppish variety – sometimes used fans too. George IV’s cockade fan, made in China around 1790, is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. Each ivory stick is meticulously carved and pierced to create four Cantonese scenes, surrounded by tiny little animals and flowers. Three Fabergé fans look remarkably restrained in the company of lavish curled ostrich feather fans, and it’s easy to become blasé among the profusion of gold and diamond-studded guardsticks (end pieces).

The exhibition also boasts some novel conversation pieces, such as the two 19th century silhouette handscreens with moving parts. When its owner pulled a lever, a comic woman would whack a stout man with her broom. I like to imagine how laughing eyes might meet over this gentle game, and a secretly coded romance ensue.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 01.01.06