Welbeck: a small feather-fan hanging from girdle.
The engraving by Johann Rutlinger: a large feather-fan, the handle of elaborate design set with jewels. Also pictures at Cobham; Woburn Abbey; Charlecote Park; Christ Church, Oxford; Penshurst; Powerscourt, and other places.
The folding-fan was not introduced into this country until the latter part of the queen’s reign; in the following pictures it appears:—
Jesus College, half length, 1590.
The Ditchley portrait, whole length, 1592; fan attached to the girdle and held in right hand.
Bodleian Library, portrait attributed to F. Zucharo.
To enumerate the different portraits, painted and engraved, in which the feather-fan appears, would be an impossible task; sufficient has been said to indicate the various forms these articles assumed. Reference may, however, be made to the feather-fan appearing in Renold Elstracke’s engraving of Anne of Denmark (queen of James I.); this consisting of three large ostrich plumes set in a jewelled handle. To the same engraver’s portrait of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James, a similar feather-fan. Also on a monumental brass, illustrated in Lipscomb’s Buckinghamshire, vol. iii. 291, the wife of John Pen, Esquire, 1641, appears with an ostrich feather-fan hung from her girdle. In a portrait attributed to Sebastian del Piombo at Frankfurt is an extremely ornate feather-fan with a silver handle.
We also obtain an excellent idea of the form these feather-fans assumed in Italy in the fifteenth century from the engraved design for a hand-screen by Agostino Carracci (illustrated facing p. 204). This consists of an admirably designed cartouche enclosing a subject of a satyr and nymphs bathing; above is a bust of Diana enclosed in a second cartouche, at the top of which is a head and wings of a Cupid; the whole is surmounted by a tuft of ostrich feathers. On the same plate are three other medallions, Neptune and Minerva, a head of Mars, and the Graces, these latter either intended as alternative subjects or for introduction at the back of the fan. The engraving is signed ‘Agust. Carazza Inv. e fe.’
The feather-fan was used by both sexes, as we learn from Bishop Hall, describing a fashionable gallant:
‘When a plum’d fan may shade thy chalked face,