Two Previously Unrecorded Panel Paintings by The Spanish Forger [France (Paris), late 19th or early 20th century]

two panels, each 364x283mm, thick wooden boards: (a) Man and his Lady hunting, small hole of nail at in centre at top and long vertical split; (b) Woman playing an Organ, small vertical splits at top and bottom; enclosed within gilt cardboard frames 

The scene of the man and his lady hunting with dogs and birds of prey was a subject used by the Spanish Forger on several occasions, with slight variations; features found in all, or most, of them include two dogs running next to a stream in the foreground; the man on horseback releasing the falcon from his wrist; a finely-dressed lady on the same or an adjacent horse; a second falcon catching its prey mid-flight; a huntsman with a spear over his shoulder; and a landscape with a castle on top of a peak in the background (cf. Voelkle, figs.48-51, 230, 299). The composition is clearly derived from the August calendar miniature in the Très Riches Heures. The woman playing an organ for her enthroned mistress, by contrast, cannot be directly paralleled in the Forger’s known oeuvre, though both images play to the popular conception of the medieval period as the Age of Chivalry and of Courtly Love: a secular rather than religious perspective.