The Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition, Winter 1926-27 [Part II]

In the previous post, we left the BFAC exhibition looking at a leaf hanging on the wall just inside the door to the Gallery. In the first exhibition-case in the Gallery was the set of six full-page miniatures illuminated by William de Brailes, lent by Chester Beatty, and now at the Fitzwilliam Museum (MS 330; all six are online here), including the one shown above, which is no. 2 of those listed below:

The Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition, Winter 1926-27 [Part I]

Most readers of this blog will be aware of the landmark 1908 exhibition of illuminated manuscripts held by the Burlington Fine Arts Club (BFAC) in 1908. In a previous post, I discussed two lesser-known exhibitions of illuminated manuscripts held by the BFAC, in 1874 and 1886.

Even less well known that either of these two exhibitions, however, each of which is commemorated by a printed catalogue, is an exhibition held during the winter of 1926 to 1927, for which there is no published catalogue.

There is, however, a typescript draft catalogue which only survives in a single copy, as far as I am aware. It was in the BFAC archive transferred to the library of the V&A Museum when the BFAC was wound-up in 1951.

The Duprat Bible [Part II]

The previous post left the Duprat Bible in the 1724 catalogue of the Château d'Anet.

Whoever bought the Bible divided each volume into two and rebound them in the present 18th-century bindings, for an unidentified owner, with a gilt “P L” (? or "L P" ?) monogram stamp in each corner:

The Herbert Bier Archive at the Wallace Collection

The Wallace Collection in London is, among other things, a centre for the study of provenance, with a regular evening seminar on the History of Collecting, but until recently I had never used the Library, which owns the archive of the Jewish art dealer Herbert Bier (1905–1981), who emigrated from Germany to London in 1938.

The Archive consists of five main types of document:

• Stock cards
• Stock books
• Photographs
• Correspondence
• Account books

Numerous medieval leaves and miniatures passed through Bier's hands, often part-owned with other dealers. As an example of how the Archive can be used to elucidate the recent provenance of such items, I give two examples below, leaves from the same manuscript.

A Walsingham MS

While at the Chester Beatty Library I also had the opportunity to look at the so-called Walsingham Bible (Western MS. 22) (on which see Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, no. 59).

[Source]

Ker (MLGB, 2nd edn., p. 192) associates it with Augustinian Canons of Walsingham, but with a "?" as the only evidence is a leaf of a Walsingham rental bound in as the first medieval leaf of the volume (fol. 2).

On a back flyleaf, however, is inscribed in a late medieval hand "Domine dominus [noster] qua(m) admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra [i.e. Psalm 8:2] Henric(us) Burnham" (fol. 135v).

Two 19th-century collectors' marks

I have just spent a day at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.














A list of Western MSS still in the library between the auctions in 1932-1933 and 1967-1968 was drawn up in 1961 by Ludwig Bieler, and is available in the reading room as a typescript.

This alerted me to some boxes of cuttings and leaves, of which I was unaware: W. MS. 165. Several items had one or both of a couple of owners' ink-stamps with which I was unfamiliar. Here are the relevant entries from Lugt: