A large, finely illuminated leaf from an early French Book of Hours, with an exquisitely detailed initial showing a funeral service, and a superb border. The initial opens the Office of the Dead, with the rubric in French above, ‘as vespres des mors antienne’, and depicts three tonsured and four black-clad mourners behind a bier, and four large candles on tall candlesticks; the clerics sing from a choir book in which square musical notation is visible and the words ‘Domine ne’, probably Psalm 6 (‘Domine ne in furore tuo …’), the first of the Seven Penitential Psalms, chanted as part of the funeral service.
The painting style is distinctive: faces are drawn with three parallel curved lines to represent the eyebrow, upper eye-socket, and upper eyelid; mouths are downturned; hands are large; blue and orange dominate the palette; and draperies are modelled with remarkable fluidity. It was likely produced in Picardy, northern France; the calendar of the parent volume (sale at Sotheby’s, 6 December 2001, lot 15), includes as major feasts, in red, St Quentin (31 October), St Ouen (24 August), and three feasts of St Eligius (25 June, 1 September, 1 December), bishop of Noyon and Tournai, all of which suggests an origin at Noyon, Amiens, or another town in that region.
Provenance: 1. The Cistercian abbey at Arnsburg, Germany, founded in 1174: inscribed ‘Bibliothec Arnsburg’; at the secularisation in 1802/3 the abbey was given to 2. the Counts of Solms-Laubach, at Schloss Laubach (near Arnsburg): this manuscript was described as being in their library by Vaubel in 1926, but was deaccessioned and broken-up within a few years. 3. Leaves offered by Gilhofer & Ranschburg, Luzern, Catalogue 128 [1929], nos. 270, 271, and 284; and again in their Lager-Katalog XIX [1929/30?], nos. 11–14. One leaf was acquired in 1939 by the Metropolitan Museum, New York (inv. no. 39.81.4). 4. Sold at Sotheby’s, 8 December 1981, lot 23. 5. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1307.
H.O. Vaubel, Die Miniaturenhandschriften … der Gräfl. Solmsischen Bibliothek zu Laubach (Giessen, 1926), no. V. Gilhofer & Ranschburg, Catalogue 218: A Beautiful Collection of Fine and Rare Books, Autographs, Manuscripts, Miniatures… (Vienna [1929]), nos. 270, 271, and 284. Gilhofer & Ranschburg, Lager-Katalog XIX: Einzel-Miniaturen des XIII. bis XV. Jahrhunderts von ausgesuchter Qualität … (Luzern [1929/30]), nos. 11–14. The leaves and the parent volume are discussed in ‘Leaves from a 14th-Century Picard(?) Book of Hours’, 8 September 2018, at mssprovenance.blogspot.com. The parent volume had a fairly standard series of texts and images except at the end, where it had three different versions of the Virgin and Child.
