Research:
Gouache on vellum.
The present fan leaf, dating from the late seventeeth or early eighteenth century, is painted with an exotic and imagined village marketplace scene. A leading specialist in textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum has remarked that it is an intriguing scene being that it is an entirely European interpretation of middle Eastern and Chinese costume; no strictly European fashionable dress is illustrated. The fan painter may have drawn on some of the various illustrated travel accounts published in Europe in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
Full research report available on request.