Nor is this the only instance that might be cited. Excellent designs for lace mounts, based upon natural forms, have from time to time been made in our schools; in this connection may be mentioned the work of Miss Lydia Hammett, of the Taunton School of Art, who has produced charming fan mounts in Brussels and other lace in which bird and plant life are happily treated, and with a proper and due sense of the limitations imposed by the material.
Miss L. Oldroyd, also, has worked a number of charming lace mounts, including one for a fan presented to Queen Victoria by the Worshipful Company of Fanmakers on the occasion of the diamond jubilee.
On the Continent, among some of the most admirably reticent work, a treatment more frankly unusual has been adopted, not without successful results. In the article on ‘Der Moderne Fächer,’ in the Kunstgewerbe-blatt for September 1904, Frau M. Erler gives several admirable examples from Vienna and elsewhere, together with illustrations of her own work, consisting of a happy arrangement of appliqué embroidery and network or gauze insertion, extremely effective, and losing none of its value from the fact of its having been obtained by simple means. We have festoons of flowers embroidered on a light ground of gauze, with ornamental spaces of network insertion; we have the mountain-ash arranged symmetrically, the leaves painted red with embroidered outline; the ‘honesty’ treated as a broad border, the outline embroidered; the rose treated as an all-over pattern, the groundwork in artfully alternated lace and net.
At the time of writing, the news of Charles Conder’s death reaches us. He was a man of singular gifts, a modern of the moderns, whose work, though doubtless derived from that of a past age, would have been impossible at any other epoch than our own. What Conder undoubtedly possessed, and in a very high degree, was that subtle quality which for lack of a better word we call style, a quality not easy of definition, but readily felt. It would be difficult to say what style is, it is far easier to say what it is not; it is not for example, design; a man may possess considerable power of design without much perception of style; it is not a sense of proportion, although this comes nearer the mark; it is not originality either, since a man may be very original indeed, and only prove himself ridiculous; it is rather, a happy blending of these several elements, and some others also.
To this great gift of nature, since this quality in its highest form cannot be acquired, Conder added practically nothing. It is with a feeling akin to resentment that we find faculties so exceedingly rare and so precious, allied to such a lamentable lack of training and art education. It is indeed possible that, if his life had been prolonged, these shortcomings would have been supplied, as Burne-Jones taught himself the human figure after he became famous; but, after all, criticism is perhaps somewhat ungracious where there is so much that is admirable, and the utility of speculations as to the ‘might have beens’ is extremely questionable.
| The Red Fan. Conversations Galantes, painted on silk by Charles Conder. | Mr. John Lane. |
The number of Conder fans existing in various collections must be considerable. Mr. Lane has a dozen, or possibly more, of which perhaps the finest is reproduced here. Silk is the material employed, to which his method is especially suited. They appear to have been mounted only in very rare instances, and are generally framed for purposes of decoration. There is no reason why they should not be used—in fact, there is every reason why they should, since suitability to a prescribed purpose is one of the very first canons of good art. Mrs. Lane has a blue fan, mounted, and in use.
The work of Frank Conder is obviously founded on that of Charles, with which it presents many features in common. Among the several fans by this artist illustrated in the winter number of the Studio, that representing two young girls holding masks, with Cupids, and in the background a river and bridge, is perhaps the most individual.
The many admirers of Mr. Brangwyn’s work, and they are legion, will doubtless welcome the two characteristic examples given of fans by his hand. In both instances, the colour scheme is a play upon blue, somewhat similar to, and at the same time, necessarily, vastly different from, the red fan of Mr. Conder. The motto of Danton the Republican—‘de l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace,’ ‘to dare, and again to dare, and always and evermore to dare,’ would seem to be peculiarly fitting to the work of Mr. Brangwyn. In the hands of a less gifted artist this would probably mean disaster; in the instance of the original of the coloured illustration, a bold gouache on silk, the result is one of almost overpowering brilliance. The half-tone illustration represents a sketch on grey paper, and must be considered merely as the first idea of a fan, to be materially modified in the working out.