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

National Gallery of Art,
Washington DC 2013.130.1 [Source]

In the first post on the The Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition, Winter 1926-27, here, I made no comment about the first item described in this image:

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

Downstairs in the Writing Room seven further items hung on a wall, all lent by Capt. Edward G. Spencer-Churchill, who, as we saw in the first post of this series, was one of the members of the Exhibition Committee.

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 Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse Miniatures

I have now published the second page of ongoing work-in-progress to track down the most recent known whereabouts of leaves and cuttings from various manuscripts, and reproductions of them.

This new page currently concerns the Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse. A link to it also appears under the "Membra disiecta" heading on the right-hand navigation panel.

A Postscript to: A Psalter Leaf at Harvard

A few months ago I wrote a post about a leaf at Houghton Library, with a miniature of the Baptism of Christ on one side and a Beatus initial on the other, in which I identified it as one of the leaves sold anonymously by Gustav Nebehay at Sotheby's in 1926.

Only later did I realise that this conflicted with the account of its provenance as published in 2010, which implies a direct line of ownership to Houghton from an auction in 1912, with no mention of the 1926 auction:

"Sold at auction in Munich in 1912 to Edgar Huidekoper Wells (1875-1938), it was acquired by George J. Dyer for the Fogg Art Museum (1927.21) before being transferred to Houghton Library in 1990"

with a footnote detailing the 1912 auction: C.G. Boerner, Leipzig, Auction CX: Manuscripte und Miniaturen des XII. bis XVI. Jahrhunderts, Handzeichnungen des XV. bis XVII. Jahrhunderts, Versteigerung ... 28. November 1912, lot 15; the image above is taken from this catalogue.

Descriptions of One Manuscript or Two?

[Digital Library@Villanova University; Source]

One of the challenges of tracing a manuscript from owner to owner is to verify that it is indeed a single manuscript whose path you are following, not two or more similar ones. We can exemplify this problem by looking at the catalogue descriptions of the Villanova manuscript discussed in a recent post.

A Scribal and Illuminated Rebus?

Among the digitized manuscripts at Villanova University, PA, is a very small (approx.100×70mm) 14th-century English copy of some of Augustine's works, with a single illuminated page at the beginning:

[This and other images: Digital Library@Villanova University; Source]

The thing that strikes me as most unusual about this first page is the lower border, with foliage sprouting from what looks like a hole in the side of a wooden barrel:

"Ancient Illuminated MSS in the Library at Calveley"

My interest was aroused by the description of of a 19th-century album that will be sold next week, whose catalogue description does not have an image:

I asked the auctioneer to send me some photos, and I have just received the images. The title-page is shown above.

Manuscripts from St-Jacques, Liège [Part I]

At the recent TEFAF art fair at Maastricht, one of the items that piqued my curiosity was a very handsome copy of Peter Lombard on the Psalms, offered by Dr Jörn Günther Rare Books. It has an impressive provenance from the early 19th century onwards, but it also had some unsolved clues to its earlier history.

In particular, there are shelfmarks in the upper right corner, and an inscription in the lower margin of the first page:

A Loose Flyleaf in Canberra

Sometimes the most unassuming fragments turn out to be among the most informative. Looking at images of recently-digitised manuscript fragments at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, my eye was caught by a flyleaf with the stencilled crest of Thomas Phillipps on the verso:

[Source]

and on the recto various late-medieval inscriptions:

[Source] 

A Psalter Leaf at Harvard

When writing the previous post about the leaves and cuttings sold by Gustav Nebehay in 1926, I concentrated on the catalogue entries that are accompanied by reproductions. I also looked through the descriptions that do not have plates, however, and felt sure I recognised lot 120, but could not immediately remember where I knew it from:

"120   Baptism of Christ. An interesting and early miniature of John Baptising Christ (140mm. by 95mm.). On the left is John the Baptist ... In the centre the figure of Christ in Jordan ... On the right an attendant angel with towel. On the back of the miniature is a large and finely designed initial B in burnished gold on a blue ground ... Germany, XIII Cent."

Soon after posting the blog I remembered where I had seen it: it is now Houghton Library, MS Typ 997 (described here):

"The Property of a Gentleman": Gustav Nebehay (1881–1935)

Some months ago, Consuelo Dutschke very generously gave me some old auction and dealer catalogues, including Sotheby's, 14-16 June, 1926:

Lots 116–150 were sold as "An Important Collection of Fine Illuminations, The Property of a Gentleman". I recognise some of them from the plates in the catalogue.

(Lots) More Libri Catalogues

Almost three years ago I did a post about some Guglielmo Libri catalogues of manuscripts that were available online.

Ten days ago the 'Histoire de la Bibliophilie' blog had a long post about a much larger number of catalogues of manuscripts described and/or sold by him (although many of them do not include medieval manuscripts):

[Source]

Another Leaf from the Buckland Missal

In a previous post I mentioned that I have an interest in manuscripts from the Throckmorton library. This interest dates from the late 1990s, when I catalogued the Bodleian Library's Buckland Missal (MS. Don. b. 5; description below), which they had owned, and included a selection of images of it on what was, at the time, a fairly early example of a considerable body of digitized manuscript images online. You may, without being aware of it, be familiar with the Missal's only remaining historiated initial: it depicts the blessing of salt and water, and is used on the homepage of Chadwyck Healey's Patrologia Latina:

The volume has had an interesting history, and its provenance can be traced in part from inscriptions added to the calendar, including the dedication of the church at Buckland, from which it takes its name:

'Dedicacio eccl(esi)e de Buc[la]nd'

A 12th-century Cistercian Missal Formerly Owned by Otto Ege

Leaves from one of the manuscripts dispersed by Otto Ege which are most easily recognised are from a Cistercian Missal, long thought to be French or Spanish. A group of four including this leaf, for example:

was attributed in Sotheby's, 25 April 1983, lot 16, to "probably France (possibly Spain)":

More Medieval Manuscripts in the Bier Archive

Among other complete manuscripts, leaves, and cuttings represented in the Bier Archive are the following:

[Source]

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.

Miniatures From a Franciscan Prayerbook?

After a hiatus of a few weeks I have re-commenced blogging; my last couple of posts have been about items in the forthcoming London July auction sales of medieval manuscripts. There will be more to come.

Regular readers will know that I enjoy virtually reuniting separated cuttings, leaves, and volumes, of dispersed manuscripts. Just now I had one of those "Aha!" moments when I recognised such a connection.

The first miniature below will be Sotheby's, 7 July 2915, lot 56, and the other one was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1958.

 

The different lighting conditions, etc., of the photographs make them appear superficially rather different, but the style appears to be the same, as do the dimensions: the Sotheby's catalogue reports its leaf to be 164×102mm, while the Philly one is reported to be 165×100mm (perhaps rounded to the nearest 5mm).

If the parent manuscript had only one image of St Francis, one would assume the image originally faced a suffrage to the saint in a Book of Hours (the Sotheby's description is careful to say "probably", not certainly, from a Book of Hours), but as he apparently appeared twice, the second time with St Clare, one of his first followers, this suggests not only that the book had a strong Franciscan element, but also that it may have been some sort of prayerbook, rather than a standard Book of Hours.

A Lavishly Illuminated 13th-Century Psalter-Hours Made for a Nun [II]

In a previous post I discussed a fascinating Psalter-Hours whose origin in uncertain. A leaf with five historiated initials is among the offerings in Sotheby's July medieval manuscripts sale:

A Leaf from the Sigmaringen Psalter Re-Emerges

The catalogue of the forthcoming Sotheby's summer sale of medieval and renaissance manuscripts (available online) includes, as lot 16, a leaf with a miniature in two compartments that I discussed in a previous post:

[click image for larger version]

The zoomable online image allows one to study details of the wonderful painting as never before: