Fan etiquette-
The craze for fans took hold in England during the Elizabethan period, when large parties and balls became fashionable. The combination of new cosmetics, heavy clothes and a crush of people meant a fan was useful for keeping cool, or at least preventing your face from running. The first ones were paddle-shaped or made from feathers, and pretty enough but by the 18th century they had become works of art. Except in England. Until the Huguenots arrived and the Chinese export trade detected a gap in the market, English fans were fairly dull and of poor quality.
The arrival of the French soon changed that, and throughout the 17thC the quality of fans improves. During the massive influx of Huguenot refugees, one Jacob Chassereau settled in London and took fan-making to a new level. The trade-card of his son Frances, with its Royal Appointment is featured below. Fans took on a strict shape and form: they were constructed as per the image in the gallery, they covered 1/3rd of a circle and must be no bigger than 12 and a half inches long. The decoration was whatever pleased the lady in question. Some of them are quite spectacular, as you can see (the white one is Chinese for the English market, and the other is French, same). The visible parts consist of the sticks and the leaf. The sticks were made of wood, ivory, mother-of-pearl, gold and so on. The leaves are often catalogued as 'swan's skin', but they aren't; they are either paper or lamb's/kid's skin.
Painters specialized in decorating fans. In England the shepherds and nymphs of Watteau and later Boucher were popular. (Watteau himself painted fans, including the bridal fan of Adelaide of Savoy in 1709.) By 1711, the craze for expensive fans had become such that Joseph Addison felt the need to mock it roundly in his coffee house publication, The Spectator. His excellent article, 'advertising' his Academy for the Instruction of the Use of the Fan explains how he drills young ladies in fan etiquette in a military fashion.
The Fluttering of the Fan is the last, and indeed the master-piece of the whole Exercise; but if a lady does not misspend her time, she may make herself mistress of it in three months...There is the angry flutter, the modest flutter, the timorous flutter, the confused flutter, the merry fluttter, and the amorous flutter...I have seen a fan so very angry, that it would have been dangerous for the absent lover who provoked it to have come within the wind of it...I need not add, that a fan is either a prude of coquet according to the nature of the person who bears it.
p.s. I teach young gentlemen the whole art of gallanting a fan.
Spectator, no. 102
This mockery arose from the purported 'Language of the Fan'. The Rotari portrait of circa 1750 of the girl with the butcher's hands seems to indicate there was some kind of message to be imparted by particular postures. Whether such a language was ever really deployed by young ladies at fashionable parties is impossible to know, but a compilation of common themes is as follows:
Fan closed, tip to lips: we are overheard
Ditto, tip to right cheek: yes
Ditto, tip to left cheek: no
Ditto, tip to forehead: you are out of your mind
Chin on tip: you annoy me
Ditto, tip to heart: I love you
Lower open fan until pointing at the ground: I hate you
The Fan-Makers' Livery Company was incorporated in 1709 (although not officially given Livery until 1806), and it still exists today as a charitable organization. It was the last of the 'original' livery companies, being number 76 and no other new Company was created until the Master Mariners in 1926 (the Carmen don't count).
