Fan, commemorative fan

This fan was painted by William Werndly who had a shop at the Golden Fan in Leicester Square. Werndly was a specialist fan painter. Another skilled craftsmen would probably have made the carved ivory sticks. Quality fan production flourished in London in this period. Although English tastes were influenced by those on the Continent, a distinctive English style of fan making emerged. London fan makers faced commercial competition from abroad as cheaper fans were imported in large quantities from China by the East India Company. The 1730s also saw the market flooded with cheap fans mass-produced domestically. Expensive, hand painted fans like this one would have been carried by fashionable women on trips to the theatre or the pleasure gardens.

The scene on the fan leaf depicts the coronation banquet of George II and Queen Caroline at Westminster Hall. It shows the ancient coronation tradition wherein the 'King's Champion', a knight in armour, would ride into the banquet and throw down his gauntlet three times to issue a challenge on the King's behalf. This tradition was abandoned, along with the banquet at Westminster Hall, after George IV's coronation in 1821.