Saturday 9 December 2017

A Third New Cutting Illuminated by the Master of the Brussels Initials

Trawling images on my hard drive this week for something completely different I came across another cutting, apparently unpublished, apparently from the same Gradual as the ones in a recent post, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts:
[source]

It depicts the Massacre of the Innocents, and thus would presumably have occurred in the parent volume very close to most of the others that are known:
  • 6 December. St Nicholas 
  • 3rd Sunday in Advent 
  • 25 December. Nativity 
  • 26 December. St Stephen
  • 28 December. The Holy Innocents

Fortunately the reverse is digitised online:
I am perhaps being overly optimistic, but the few visible letters of text:
appear to be part of a standard Matins response for the feast of the Holy Innocents:
"Sub altare dei audivi voces occisorum ... adhuc sustinete modicum tempus ..."
The inscriptions on the back include the present inventory number, in red "65.248":
an attribution "Ital. 1400":
 and old number in a Continental hand "10176":
and a stock number "54567" that appears twice, once on the paper strip to the right, and once on the printed dealer's label:

Doll & Richards Inc. was a gallery in Boston from 1866 onwards; they moved periodically, and were at 71 Newbury Street at some point between 1908 and 1962. A view of the showroom at this address is available online via the Smithsonian:
[source]
The cutting was bequeathed to the Detroit Institute of Arts by John S. Newberry, their former curator of graphic arts; there is a brief obituary in The New York Times, and a longer one in the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 44 no. 4 (1965), pp. 67-69.

1 comment:

  1. Well done, Peter. John Stoughton Newberry (1910-1964) was a member of the Harvard Class of 1933, but is otherwise unknown to me. So is Doll & Richards. Newberry was a student of Paul J. Sachs and made gifts to Harvard's Fogg Museum and to the Detroit Institute of Art and the MOMA in New York. Clealry both he and the gallery would bear some further investigataion.
    Bill Stoneman

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