St. Christopher, full-page miniature on a leaf from an exceptional Book of Hours, Use of Sarum, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum [England (perhaps Lincolnshire or East Anglia), late fourteenth century]

This is one of three crucial leaves from this manuscript which bear the initials “k, n, e, y, f, t”, and allow the identification of the original patron as a member of the influential Knyvett family. Its flyleaf was inscribed “Thys is mystrys marys boke” and by 1761 it was owned by Thomas Boycott. The present leaf was acquired by the current owner in our rooms, 18 June 2002, lot 20.

This is a full-page miniature from one of the most unusual and intriguing examples of fourteenth-century English book-art. The parent manuscript is described in detail in Quaritch, A Catalogue of Illuminated and other Manuscripts, 1931, no.56, with two plates. It was sold by Quaritch to H.P. Kraus in March 1941, and broken up, with single miniatures in our rooms, 9 February 1948, lots 215-6 and in Kraus, Cat.80, 1956, nos.a-e, and these and others have reappeared on the market most recently in our rooms, 19 June 1990, lot 32 (ex Korner collection; sold for £9500, later catalogued by Voelkle and Wieck as part of the Bernard H. Breslauer collection, 1992, no.17), again in our rooms, 7 July 2009, lot 107 (also ex Korner collection; sold for £22,000) and Christies, 10 January 1996, lot 4 (ex Pope-Hennessy collection). Further leaves are in the Los Angeles County Museum, acc.no.M74.1200, the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Fl., nos.730-1, and the Berger Collection in the Denver Art Museum.

All of the miniatures are in the form found here, with the saints in the upper compartment on top of a half-page of dazzlingly colourful tiles. It has been suggested that the illuminator may have been following a pattern-sheet in the wrong format for the pages here, that the lower half of the page may once have been intended for text (the latter dispelled by an inscription under the decoration on the leaf sold at Christies in 1996), or that the illuminator misunderstood the perspective in his model (that doubtful given the water at the feet of the saint in the present leaf). Parallels can be found for the bold tessellated backgrounds in two manuscripts of Guillaume Deguilleville by the same illuminator (New York Public Library, Spencer MS.19, and Bodleian, Laud, Misc.740, perhaps produced in Lincolnshire: Pächt and Alexander, III, pl.lxxxviii, 925a-b), and in an alchemical manuscript compiled for Richard II in 1391 (Bodleian, MS.Bodley 581: ibid. III, no.673, pl.lxx), but no convincing comparison has been made between the miniatures of this manuscript and any other. The answer may in fact be quite simple, in that the models used by the artist may be from sculpture rather than the book-arts. The gilt and coloured tiles and their decoration in white penwork can also be found on surviving examples of painted Nottingham alabasters (cf. Pitman, ‘Speculations on fourteenth-century English alabaster work’, Connoisseur February 1964, pp.82-9, pl.7, and Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, 1984, pl.iv, vi and viii, with close parallels for the saint here on pp.92-3) and it may well be that the artist was consciously trying to visually echo the plastic arts, placing each saint’s effigy on top of a brightly decorated plinth. If the artist were from East Anglia, then such models would be readily available to him, and this leaf a valuable witness to crossover between the plastic and graphic arts.