The Fan-Painter of Florence

Among the most delicate and exquisite creations of the Eighteen Nineties were the painted silk fans of Charles Conder, often depicting elegant 18^th century figures in terraced gardens, or Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine and Scaramouche in masquerade, or nymphs and satyrs at sport. 

There is a remark attributed to Oscar Wilde about ‘poor Conder’, a diffident soul, trying hesitantly to get clients to part with some beggarly sum for a fan for which they would willingly pay far more. The impoverished painter spent some time in Dieppe and other French harbour towns, where the living was cheap and he could just about get by.

I had thought that this art was, though not unique to him, at least rare and not essayed by many others. But recently I found a reference to ‘Collingwood Gee, the fan-painter’, who is mentioned in passing in Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop by Joy Grant (1967) as one of the English expatriate community in Florence.

Here, he was an acquaintance of D H Lawrence, and is depicted by him in Aaron’s Rod (1922) as Louis Mee, ‘little Mee, who . . . sat with a little delighted disapproval on his tiny, bird-like face’, an artist who has existed on meagre means but has recently come into money. 

In 1933 Gee painted from memory a portrait (not on a fan) of Lawrence reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Norman Douglas, the bookseller Giuseppe Orioli, and the Wildean aesthete Reggie Turner, the author of King Philip the Gay (1911) and other rococo fantasies. According to some sources, Gee was also a musician, who once gave performances in the English provinces.

I was so struck by the idea of a fan-painter in Florence, and the aura this suggested, that I wrote a poem on this theme, now boldly published, in its first issue, by a new online poetry magazine edited by Colin Bancroft, 192 (named after the former telephone directory enquiries line in Britain). You'll find it under the fan. 

This poem is not directly about either Charles Conder or the splendidly-named Collingwood Gee, but evokes an imagined fan-painter, rather in the Aubrey Beardsley mode, sauntering in the Renaissance city.

This is not the only poem in this premier issue with an uncanny theme. Juleigh Howard Hobson, in the wonderfully eerie ‘Bailiwick’, dedicated to Yeats, evokes ‘A blurry shape in the driveway, motion/In the falling twilight . . .’ and ‘Rippled shadows where there is no wind’, among other spectral resonances.  Emily Barker’s ‘Still Life With Writing Desk’, is a subtly inflected portrait of a recluse in Autumn, also conversant with ghosts.

And there are other hauntings here, of a discarded mirror in a skip, of a pale doll-like ballerina, of the call of a waterfowl in an icy lake, even the contents of a handbag. We can't quite be sure of figures, forms, memories, movements, many of these poems seem to say: look more closely.    

(Mark Valentine)