A hand-painted fan showing a long-lost view of a Bath landmark that Jane Austen would have known has been acquired by the city’s Holburne Museum, where it will go on display for the first time.
The rare fan, which had been in a private collection, shows elegantly dressed people strolling in Harrison’s Walk, a tree-lined riverside walk kept exclusive by paid subscription. The building in the background contained Bath’s first assembly rooms, known as Harrison’s Rooms, built for an entrepreneur in 1708 at the urging of Beau Nash, who became the arbiter of good taste and genteel behaviour as Bath became the most fashionable spa in Georgian England.
It was painted around 1750 by Thomas Loggon, a renowned fan painter with dwarfism who ran a teahouse and china shop under the sign of The Little Fanmaker. As well as the fashionable group chatting with Nash, Loggon included himself in the scene, the slight figure towards the right.
Harrison’s Rooms burned down in 1820, and were replaced by the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, which in turn was demolished in 1933 to make way for a road-widening scheme. Part of the site is now known as Bog Island, site of a public lavatory reincarnated in the 1980s as a nightclub.
