Victorian mother of pearl fan with mixed Brussels lace

This is by far the prettiest fan I have ever sold, the lace is exquisite. I love the asymmetric pattern, a beautiful, naturalistic spray of delicate flowers and butterflies, like a photograph frozen into lace. The lace is a mixed lace, which means it is a mixture of both handmade bobbin lace and needlepoint lace on a fine machine made net ground.

Bobbin lace is quite similar to weaving, the fine thread is wound onto many little lace bobbins, which are passed around pins on a cushion that mark out a design in a particular order, to create the 'clothwork' petals & leaves etc (see detail in picture 6). Needlepoint lace is quite a different technique, akin to embroidery, as the name suggests: threads are roughly tacked onto a pattern to give the basic outline, then a single needle & thread is used to work thousands of buttonhole stitches over these foundation threads, and then to create different filling stitches for the centres of the petals etc (see detail in picture 7).

The fan was made by J. Duvelleroy, a top maker of the time, I love the added stamp on the label: Fans Mended - such a thing of beauty was to be treasured, even if something went horribly wrong, and it suffered some sort of damage. It would have been considered an heirloom piece, so would have been looked after very carefully.