Rare Louisiana Creole Gros Rouge Punkah , late 18th/early 19th c., likely Southern yellow pine, pegged, mortise and tenon construction, raised central panel surrounded by applied molding, waisted triangular shape with strongly curving shoulders, and lower corners flanking a shaped skirt, hanging elements include small wrought iron pins extending from the lower portion of each shoulder and a round finial-type projection drilled with a hole; retains the original surface, h. 40 1/2 in., w. 35 in. Provenance: Private Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana; Acquired Neal Auction Company, October 2, 2004, lot 722.Ill.: Holden, Jack, et al. Furnishing Louisiana, Creole and Acadian Furniture 1735-1835. New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2010, p. 89. Note: Derived from the Hindi word for the wings of a bird, punkahs are large swinging fans affixed to the ceiling. Coming into common use in India in the late 18th century, punkahs became essential in tropical climates, particularly throughout the British Empire. In the Antebellum South, elaborate punkahs became a regular dining room fixture as they not only cooled the occupants but shooed flies from the table. As Indian punkahs were operated by low-cast punkahwallas, American punkahs were fanned by enslaved adults and children, often dressed in livery, as evidence of the household’s opulence and reinforcing the master-slave dynamic. Scholar Dana Byrd has explored the unintended benefits of operating a punkah, as hearing dinner conversation with revelations of important news and observation of high society habits was possible. Among the many enslaved children with duty at the fan was Booker T. Washington, who described how he learned about “the subject of freedom and the war” as he, invisible and silent, fanned his owners’ table in the 1860s.This lot retains original iron fasteners and most of its painted surface. The form of this punkah shows the vogue of Grecian style in Southern Louisiana of the early 19th century. While most Anglo-Colonial punkahs were rectangular, this example is entirely curvilinear with a trapezoidal center panel, likely to harmonize with the broad Neoclassical scrolls of fashionable dining room furniture below. Ref.: Dana E. Byrd. “Motive Power: Fans, Punkahs, and Fly Brushes in the Antebellum South.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, vol. 23, no. 1, 2016, pp. 29–51. https://research.bowdoin.edu/punka-project/ Eve Kahn. “How Ceiling Fans Allowed Slaves to Eavesdrop on Plantation Owners.” Atlas Obscura, May 14, 2018. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/punkah-project-fans-antebellum-south