Antique French Bone Ladies Fan With Mirror Embellishment. French bone and silk fan with painted scene of nobles in a garden, with filigree vine frame. Small mirror embellishment on topmost fan blade.

Size: 11 1/2 x 19 in. 

#4529 . 

The Zheshan (folding fan) was likely invented in Japan some time in the 9th Century AD, and in 988 they were first introduced in China by a Japanese monk as a tribute during the Northern Song dynasty; these folding fans became very fashionable in China by the time of the Southern Song dynasty. First referred to as “Japanese fans” by the Chinese, they gained popularity as Chinese artisans began to craft miniature images on them in ink or watercolor. The Qianlong Emperor painted a fan with a poem and landscape of the surrounding countryside as a gift for his mother, the Empress Dowager Xiaoshengxian, in 1762. They had reached their zenith in the Ming Dynasty, although towards the end of the Qing Dynasty they began to be seen as tools of lower-class people and servants, and today are primarily sold to tourists. They rapidly spread throughout Europe and eventually the New World as their popularity grew, and were manufactured in these areas using local materials and innovative designs to appeal to their regional markets, becoming a symbol of status and wealth. In the modern era, folding fans are made around the world, and of varying substances and degrees of quality, with stunning examples from past ages and countries found in museums all over the globe, and are infinitely more accessible to all classes.