Fashionable Figures, with Two Women Holding Fans

British School · 1733–35

Medium

Oil on plaster, mounted on aluminum honeycomb panel

Original size

81.4 × 153.5 cm (32 1/16 × 60 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

"Fashionable Figures, with Two Women Holding Fans" offers a rare window into the social world of early Georgian England — two elegantly dressed women caught mid-exchange, their silk gowns and ivory fans conveying everything about status, leisure, and the rituals of polite society. Attributed to the British School of the 1730s, the painting reflects a period when portraiture and genre scenes blurred seamlessly together. Artists working in this tradition absorbed Continental influences — particularly Dutch and French masters — while developing a distinctly British feel for the composed dignity of fashionable life. What makes this work particularly unusual is its medium: oil applied directly to plaster, which strongly suggests it was conceived as an architectural decoration, a mural-scale statement of refinement intended for a specific interior rather than a portable canvas hung in a gallery. The painting survives today in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it has been conserved and remounted onto an aluminum honeycomb panel — a modern intervention that likely saved a surface vulnerable to the kind of damage that has claimed so many comparable works. Our hand-painted oil reproduction captures the warmth and texture of the original, translating its muted palette, layered brushwork, and the quiet social theatre between its two subjects onto canvas with the same care the original artist brought to plaster.