| Woodcock Feather Fan composed of 6250 feathers supplied by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales. | H.R.H. the Princess of Wales. |
The system of applied feather-work is referred to on a number of occasions in this work, several illustrations being given, notably the Chinese feather screens belonging to Mr. Crewdson, and the Queen Anne screen of Mr. Messel. The practice was common during the latter half of the eighteenth century, used both for fans and other purposes, and it was a favourite pastime with Mrs. Montague, who refers to it in one of her letters, dated 1785:—‘I am obliged to you for your kind attention to my feather-work. The neck and breast feathers of the stubble goose are very useful, and I wish your cook would save those of the Michaelmas goose for us. Things homely and vulgar are sometimes more useful than the elegant, and the feathers of the goose may be better adapted to some occasions than the plumes of the Phœnix.’
Thus Cowper, On Mrs. Montagu’s Feather Hangings:
‘The Birds put off their ev’ry hue,
To dress a room for Montagu.’
Fashion has again, during recent years, adopted this system of feather decoration for fans.
‘The latest craze of Viennese society,’ says the New York Commercial, November 23, 1890, ‘is a passion for fans of mountain-cock feathers. The last question the young Austrian belle asks her admirer before he goes on a hunt is, “Won’t you try, please, to bag me a fine fan?” An ideal fan of this kind must contain only feathers from birds brought down by the most expert shots, and every feather must be the lone representative of the giver’s skill; consequently, such a fan may record the admiration and skill of sixty or seventy hunters. It is not unusual to have cut in the ribs of the fans a brief account of the circumstances under which the birds were shot. The German Empress is said to have expressed a wish last summer for such a fan, and ever since that time the young bloods of the Austrian Court, who have already bagged fans for their own women, have been shooting right and left for the Empress’s sake. The handle of the fan, now being completed in Vienna, will be set with jewels in the Prussian colours.’
A more unique example of the spoils of sport is the fan which, by the graciousness of H.R.H. the Princess of Wales, we are enabled to illustrate here. In this, the blades are of red tortoise-shell, twenty in number. The feather portion is composed of a series of tiny feathers from the wing of the woodcock. These, 6520 in number, were supplied by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales from the wings of 3260 woodcocks, there being one only of these miniature feathers in each wing of the bird. Each single feather is fixed with two stitches of thread and worked upon a linen base, the back being formed of the ordinary feathers from the breast and wings.
The fan was commenced on the 18th August 1900, and only completed on the 28th October 1901. The lady who worked it was unable to apply herself for more than an hour or so at a time, the work being so excessively fine and tedious.