A fan with on a silken page, embroidered with golden and colored paillettes, it’s painted at distemper following the Fragonard’s style.
The page, representing a “seasons’ allegory”, is a typical example of the neoclassical style, launched by the Queen Marie Antoinette and it will expand all over the Northern Europe so to cross the century and the continent, especially in the architecture and internal decoration world.
The seasons are represented by four lateral putto holding the classical symbols: spikes and basket of flowers ( summer and spring), a brazier and a basket of grapes (winter and fall), at the center there are the winds represented by another blowing putto.
All the fan is vertically divided by decorations of different nature, from the longed pot surmounted by flowers to the ribbon holding other symbols of summer and fall.
I put this fan to 1780, but generally, I’d put it in the years preceding the storming of the Bastille.
The ivory sticks are golden damascened to the throat, sculpted and golden painted on the guard.
"Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail."
Leonardo Da Vinci
