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. Less clear, however, is the motive of Robinson Crusoe, that ingenious man, in creating a parasol-umbrella for himself on his island. In his admirable essay ‘The Philosophy of Umbrellas’ Robert Louis Stevenson suggests that Crusoe’s object in going to such trouble was moral: ‘The memory of a vanished respectability called for some outward manifestation, and the result was — an umbrella.’

He adds: ‘A pious castaway might have rigged up a belfry and solaced his Sunday mornings with the mimicry of church bells; but Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.’