By Leslie Gordon · Richmond, BC · October 2026
From the counter at The Pound & The Provenance
There are two ways a fan gets made, and if you have a case full of them the way I do right now, you can see both at once.
Some are painted by hand. A painted fan is a one-of-a-kind thing — and I mean that even when the same painter sat down and painted the same peony, the same swallow, the same spray of blossom, over and over for years. No two ever came off the brush quite alike. The hand gets tired, or happy, or careless in a way that turns out lovely. You can stand in front of a dozen of them and feel which afternoon was a good one.
The others are printed. Made in their hundreds, meant for everyone, never meant to be rare. People want me to say the printed ones are the lesser ones, and I won’t. They’re beautiful. They were simply made to be had, not to be hunted.
If you want to look closely — and I always do — the frame tells you as much as the leaf. The ribs are called sticks; the two stout outer ones that take all the wear are the guards. Some of mine have sticks cut in fine openwork, little pierced patterns, so when you open them the light comes through the bones as well as the paper. Several are signed. A signature won’t always tell you who — a name you can’t read is still a name you can’t read, and I’d rather say so than make one up — but it tells you someone meant it. Someone put their mark on an afternoon’s work and let it go.
And that’s the part I turn over, some mornings.
Every one of these passed through a hand before it reached my glass shelf. Somebody carried it home, opened it at a window, snapped it shut in a warm room. I’ve never owned a fan myself. Truth be told, I’ve never personally owned much of anything. It’s only here, in the shop, that I own all of them at once — and I sell them, happily…
I wonder about that sometimes. But I think a fan might be the right thing to feel it about. A fan isn’t built to be kept in a drawer and owned. It’s built to be opened, and passed along, hand to hand, until it reaches one more. I don’t keep them. I just happen to be one of the hands.
Come open a few, if you like. That’s what they’re for.
Leslie
778-708-0454
The Pound & the Provenance
7791 Steveston Highway
(northwest corner of No. 3 Road and Steveston Highway)
Richmond, BC, Canada
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Please Note: I am not an appraiser, a silversmith or a gemologist. I am an antiques dealer. A generalist with a love for things with a bit of age. I had a stroke, four years ago, and AI is helping me to do better than I would have. Nothing here is false, everything here is true. I hope you enjoy it and please leave a message.
