Beschreibung:

Christ before Pilate, in a finely executed historiated initial, with a human figure, perhaps a wildman, and two boars in the margins, from a known Book of Hours, in Latin, manuscript on parchment [most probably Utrecht, northern Netherlands, for an English patron, c. 1400-10 (and certainly before 1417)] Single leaf, with a large (8-line) initial in blue with white and black interior penwork, enclosing Christ bound and held by two of his captors, before an seated Pilate in softly modelled blue and pink robes, all on gold grounds, full text borders of coloured ivy-leaf foliage and angular gold bars, these enclosing a seated figure in the outer vertical panel, who watches the scene in the initial (the figure either a wildman or naked human), and two large boars in a grassy scene in the bas-de-page, two 3-line illuminated initials on blue and burgundy grounds, one-line initials in gold or blue with purple or red penwork, line-fillers in red and blue bars arranged around dots of gold, red rubrics, capitals touched in red, single column of 16 lines of an angular gothic bookhand, upper section of initial and parts of border rubbed, but leaf still notably fine, trimmed at inner vertical margin with slight losses to edges of borders there, small fold at head of leaf, overall slightly darkened, remnants of paper on inner vertical margin on reverse from last mounting, but in presentable condition, 129 by 95mm. This is the missing miniature leaf opening Prime in the Hours of the Virgin from an early Book of Hours of mixed Utrecht-Sarum use, then later adapted for York, which is now Huntingdon Library, HM 57340; identified as in the hand of a Utrecht follower of the Master of Margaret of Cleves Provenance: 1. The parent manuscript was most probably written in Utrecht (script, decoration, Use of Office of the Dead and localisation of some red feasts in Calendar) for an English owner (Sarum use of Hours of the Virgin and some saints in Calendar), and in 1417 was used to record the birth of a daughter to John Newsom perhaps of the Yorkshire family of the same name (see P. Kidd, 'Supplement to the Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library', The Huntington Library Quarterly, 72, 2009, pp. 33-41; noting the present leaf on p. 38), with some later additions indicating use there. A number of leaves were removed from the parent volume, and it passed from Bruce Ferrini to Sam Fogg and thence to the Huntingdon in 1998 2. The present leaf acquired in the North American trade in 2004. Illumination: While the damage here cannot be ignored, the refined quality of the workmanship is clear, and this leaf is one of the oldest known Dutch miniatures. Almost no northern Netherlandish pictorial art survives before 1400, and examples as early as this are of great rarity on the market (the only other known to us is the unrelated miniature of the Scourging of Christ published by James Marrow as Horas de Margarida de Cleves, The Hours of Margaret of Cleves, 1995, pp. 53, 92 (as n. 101) and fig. 37, and then sold in Sotheby's, 7 December 2004, lot 21). As James Marrow noted in correspondence with Roger Martin soon after its acquisition, the scene of the present leaf shows noted similarities of general composition and the figure of the man dressed in red in the foreground with those on fol. 68v of the Hours of Margaret of Cleves, written c. 1395-1400 (Lisbon, C. Gulbenkian Museum, Ms. L.A..148), that volume more-or-less the earliest illustrated Dutch manuscript (J.H. Marrow, The Golden Age of Dutch Manuscript Painting, 1989, no. 1). Our artist must have been a close follower of that master, and perhaps even a close member of his workshop, trained by him.