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Amgueddfa Cymru’s Fancy Fans: 18th century Fan Making Business and the Importance of Female Fan Makers

Rosanna Harrison, 4 June 2019

In the first part of this blog I looked at the physicality and subject-matter of a small number of fans housed at St Fagans National Museum of History. In this second and final part of the blog, I would like to discuss some of the aesthetic objects 18th century fan shops, warehouses and stalls business displayed and sold. To conclude, I will briefly discuss the fan maker Martha Gamble (active before 1710 to after 1740).

Many fan shops sold prints and, equally, a great number of print shops sold fans. During the 1700s the status of prints increased as the market for prints which could be framed for display grew. The fan makers Sarah Ashton (active before 1750 to 1807) and George Wilson (active before 1770 to after 1801) sold a range of printed artwork, including stipple-engraved illustrated children’s maxims in Wilson’s case. Additionally, fan makers borrowed from the visual language of genre prints. The popular stock characters from the pictorial and literary trope of ‘Old Darby’ and ‘Old Joan’, visually relating to rural representations circulated in print by publishers like Bowles and Carver, were one common source of pictorial inspiration.

There is an extraordinary female fan maker whose work is represented at St Fagans. One of her fans is to be found in this collection, an Allegorical Fan (Untitled) painted with an image of (almost certainly) Queen Anne (1665-1714) and an inscription of ‘11 October 1743’ and the maker’s name ‘M. Gamble’. Although (Martha) Gamble created this fan a decade or so after Queen Anne’s death, images of the Queen were still widespread in the 1720s and 1730s. Gamble was a highly regarded female fan maker, who owned The Golden Fan in St Martin’s Court, St Martin’s Lane. Its reputation built upon Gamble’s renown for her use of the fan as a vehicle on which to present popular stories transposed from narrative print and painting series. Gamble sold copies of William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) A Harlot’s Progress, completed between 1732 and 1733, advertised in the Evening Post as ‘engraved from the Original prints of Mr. Hogarth; in which the characters are justly preserved and beautifully published’. A Harlot’s Progress was made by Giles King, who specialised in reproducing printed images made by the Dutchman Arnout van Aken, in alliance with Gamble. Examining these fans makes evident their intrinsic link to print work produced in the same period and helps us to understand and appreciate these fascinating objects better.

Dr Rosanna Harrison

Learning Pool Facilitator: Clore Discovery Gallery/Prev. Art Exhibition Evaluation Placement
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