And another thing | 21 July 2007

The wet weather this summer has made me think about umbrellas, and the curious moral associations they attract. It is not so in the Orient, where they were invented (in China) sometime early in the first millennium bc. There they were designed to protect exalted persons against the sun. They were carried by attendants in state processions and were associated with power, privilege and class. We would call them parasols. The plebs were not allowed to possess or use them and often they were carefully graded, in size and elaboration, in accordance with the dignity of the owner. There are occasional hints of similar status-parasols in the West. Thus Louis XIV’s dreadful court painter, Charles Le Brun, in his only really successful work, The Chancellor Séguier in Procession, shows this high official on horseback, attended by pages, one of whom holds a fringed silk sunshade over his head. That vignette clearly indicates the adoption of an oriental custom, rather than an indigenous invention.