Pierre Morgue for Le Grand Teddy

Fontange or balloon shaped fan with painted wooden sticks.

The double paper leaf is printed on the recto with a chromolithograph of the interior of Le Grand Teddy, with patrons partaking and a waiter hoisting a dancer; signed ‘P. Morgue’.
Le Grand Teddy, probably named after President Theodore Roosevelt, was a fashionable American style bar and restaurant located on rue Carmartin, Paris. Three oval-shaped works by the painted Edouard Vuillard (1868 – 1940) are known to have hung within the establishment’s interior. A gestural representation of one of these works is recorded on this fan: on the right hand side an oval frame is seen through an open arch.

This fan appeared in the BBC series ‘Fake or Fortune’ in an episode dedicated to proving the authenticity of one of Vuillard’s ‘Le Grand Teddy’ works. Morgue’s design is the only known representation of the interior of Le Grand Teddy. However, original plans for the restaurant were held within the archive of the Bibliothèque Nationale and respond to the artist’s design with great accuracy.