Apollo with Mercury and a muse.

Bookseller Notes

Very scarce late eighteenth-century fan with an engraved cartouche of Apollo receiving the lyre from Hermes, after a design by Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727-1785). The V&A holds Cipriani's original watercolour illustration (accession no. 97B-1892), which was engraved by Bartolozzi as a ticket for a benefit concert held by the Italian composer and violinist Felice de Giardini (1716-96). Benefit concerts were an important promotional tool for eighteenth-century musicians, and Giardini - director of London's Italian Opera - gave many such. His friend Cipriani produced various ticket designs for him, frequently on classical themes. The design on our fan (which is unsigned), has slight variations on the watercolour and the ticket engraving, the most conspicuous of which is the clothing and drapery that has been added to the figures here. Ticket designs were often notably risqu, with a degree more nudity than was deemed acceptable for a ladies' fan. Fans with designs by Cipriani are uncommon, and we haven't been able to trace a like example. Cust's catalogue of the Schreiber collection lists only two with designs after Cipriani (p. 76), and this is not amongst them.See: Simon McVeigh The violinist in London's concert life, 1750-1784 : Felice Giardini and his Contemporaries (University of Oxford DPhil. thesis, 1979).