"Madame X" and the Marcadé Collection

During the past few years I have tried hard to verify the identity the woman whose manuscript illuminations were auctioned anonymously at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, on 6 December 1926:

Title-page

[detail]

"Catalogue des enluminures de hautes époques, tirés des manuscrits et antiphonaires ... appartenant a Madame X ... dont la vente aux enchères publique aura lieu Galerie Georges Petit ... le lundi 6 décembre 1926"

Unnoticed Leaves from the Beaupré Antiphonary

"Ego Ioh(ann)es sc(ri)psi hunc librum"
Baltimore, WAM, MS W.761 fol. 1r [Source]

The surviving volumes of the Beaupré Antiphonary perhaps comprise the most famous choirbook of the Middle Ages, made in 1289-90 for the Cistercian nunnery of Beaupré, near Grammont in the diocese of Cambrai. It has been described as "one of the great monuments of gothic art" [1].

The volumes have had a succession of illustrious modern owners, including John Ruskin, Henry Yates Thompson, Alfred Chester Beatty, and William Randolph Hearst; it is now at the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (MSS W.759-762), where it has been fully catalogued and digitized.

When John Ruskin owned it, he extracted a number of leaves to give to friends. A few of them contained major decoration, but most were much more ordinary-looking text leaves, and these occasionally appear on the market.

David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook, 2nd edition, 2019

The first edition of David Pearson's, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (1994) has been a frequent source of help to me since 1994, and I am delighted that a new revised edition has just been published.

Franks

Augustus Wollaston Franks [Source]

British bookplates are often identified by the name "Franks" and a number.

This refers to the catalogue of the collection of bookplates bequeathed to the British Museum by Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826–97) [Wikipedia]:

E.R.J. Gambier Howe, Franks Bequest: Catalogue of British and American Nook Plates Bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks (3 vols, London, 1903–4)

This is available online in several digitized copies, of which perhaps the best is the one scanned by the University or Toronto:

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3

The catalogue entries are by necessity very succinct, but quite easy to use once one understands their conventions.

An Unpublished English Missal, Made for Sées c.1332

A year ago I downloaded a very large number of images of illuminated manuscripts in French provincial libraries, and have been working through them ever since. Recently, after browsing through thousands of images of French manuscripts, I was surprised to suddenly encounter a series of images of one whose script and decoration is distinctively English.

The manuscript is in the diocesan archives of Sées [Wikipedia], in Normandy. (Confusingly, Sées used to be spelled Séez, and this spelling is still used by the diocese, which can lead to confusion with Séez [Wikipedia] in southwestern France). Digging around a bit, I came to the surprising realisation that it is almost entirely unpublished in print, and online sources consider it to be French.

Provenance Seminar in Lyon, 3 April

For any readers who will be in France in April and who have not already heard about it, I thought it would be worth bringing to their attention a seminar that will take place in Lyon on 3 April, about the Study of Provenance in Heritage Collections of French Libraries.

Here is the programme:

Another Cutting by the Master of the Brussels Initials

Here's another cutting to add to those listed in a previous blogpost, here. It is Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 201.13g, and its associaton with the other published cuttings is duly noted in Morgan, Panayotova, and Reynolds, Illuminated Manuscripts in Cambridge, I (2011), no. 188.