We have recently acquired this lovely fan, with gold and pink decoration on the black lacquer.
Carl L Crossman, in The Decorative Arts of the China Trade, 1991, p336, illustrates a very similar fan with its original silk-covered box, with a label inside the lid which reads ‘OLD HIP’, for the Chinese merchant Hipqua. An American visiting Hipqua’s workshop in the 1840s was very impressed: ‘So fine is some of the work that a man engaged for six entire weeks in painting a fan which I bought’. This may well be one of those fine fans.
Size: 20cm high; 34 cm across
Price: £1,500