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tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-09-19 09:45 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-09-19 09:45 pm
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Possibly-dodgy info on fan-making!
This weekend is the Journées du Patrimoine, where historically and culturally important buildings all over France (and a good part of the rest of Europe, apparently) are opened to the public. I know I should've done something cool and unique that wasn't open the rest of the year, but Smith already got us guided tours of the Hôtel de Ville and the Assemblée Nationale, which are probably the only things I would've been interested in that aren't normally open to the public. So instead I went to the Musée de l'Eventail, which is cute and tucked away in an apartment building and still contains an active fan-making workshop. I don't know if they normally give guided tours or if it was just for this weekend, but we did indeed get a guided tour, with lots of technical vocabulary in French that I'm not going to be able to translate very well.
The biggest thing I took away from it is that "éventailliste" is actually ridiculously un-specific, because there are lots of subspecialties within the trade. There's the work of making the supports/sticks/whatever you want to call them, out of wood or ivory or mother-of-pearl or whatever: shaping, carving, decorating, punching tiny holes in very delicate mother-of-pearl to make those amazing lacy-looking brisé fans. I got the impression that that part was generally a masculine profession. Then you have the work of painting the leaf (either cloth or paper), which I surmise was fairly gender-neutral. Then you have the decoration work that was almost exclusively reserved for women: lacemaking, embroidery, sequins, etc. You also have someone overseeing the whole operation to make sure everything fits and that no faces are going to be painted onto a fold, and finally the work of folding and mounting the paper leaf onto the panels. I am not sure which of these roles the word "éventailliste" refers to, because generally you'd have a bunch of people in an atelier doing various tasks, not a single person assembling entire fans one by one.
Fans went out of fashion in the beginning of the 19th century (though you did sometimes see small ones), and didn't really make a comeback until 1830. There were the usual "folded paper mounted on panels with a scene painted on it" fans that were popular in the 18th century, although in the 19th century themes from everyday bourgeois life (births, deaths, marriages, children) were much more popular than the traditional pastoral scenes. There was also a huge resurgence in brisé fans, where the body of the fan is made up of the panels themselves instead of painted folded paper/cloth. These could get very elaborate and were incredibly arduous to make.
These are mostly impressions--especially about the trade of fanmaking itself--so if anyone has more concrete information, please share. XD
The biggest thing I took away from it is that "éventailliste" is actually ridiculously un-specific, because there are lots of subspecialties within the trade. There's the work of making the supports/sticks/whatever you want to call them, out of wood or ivory or mother-of-pearl or whatever: shaping, carving, decorating, punching tiny holes in very delicate mother-of-pearl to make those amazing lacy-looking brisé fans. I got the impression that that part was generally a masculine profession. Then you have the work of painting the leaf (either cloth or paper), which I surmise was fairly gender-neutral. Then you have the decoration work that was almost exclusively reserved for women: lacemaking, embroidery, sequins, etc. You also have someone overseeing the whole operation to make sure everything fits and that no faces are going to be painted onto a fold, and finally the work of folding and mounting the paper leaf onto the panels. I am not sure which of these roles the word "éventailliste" refers to, because generally you'd have a bunch of people in an atelier doing various tasks, not a single person assembling entire fans one by one.
Fans went out of fashion in the beginning of the 19th century (though you did sometimes see small ones), and didn't really make a comeback until 1830. There were the usual "folded paper mounted on panels with a scene painted on it" fans that were popular in the 18th century, although in the 19th century themes from everyday bourgeois life (births, deaths, marriages, children) were much more popular than the traditional pastoral scenes. There was also a huge resurgence in brisé fans, where the body of the fan is made up of the panels themselves instead of painted folded paper/cloth. These could get very elaborate and were incredibly arduous to make.
These are mostly impressions--especially about the trade of fanmaking itself--so if anyone has more concrete information, please share. XD