Boerner Auction CX, Addendum

Following on from a recent post, I have realised that lot 51 in the Boerner catalogue, later lot 32 in the Lanna-Prag catalogue, was later owned by Edouard Kann and Robert Lehman, and is now in The Met, NYC, where all this provenance is recorded.

[Source]

But, to judge by their online description, The Met is apparently unaware that another of its leaves was also in the Boerner auction, as lot 17, where it was attributed to 13th-century France:

Like the Psalter leaf now at Harvard, it was apparently unsold in the auction, and re-offered by Boerner in a fixed-price catalogue the following year:

It was given to The Met in 1939 by Sarah Gibbs Thompson Pell, and is now attributed to Swabia, c.1400:

[Source]

The priest's scroll reads:

"Prespiter Albert(us) hui(us) libri tibi munus. | Dat pia virgo p(re)ces p(ro) me peto ferte sorores"

And the nun's reads "Mater mis(eri)c(or)die miserere mei. Liugardi."

The Met description and a web-search suggest that the leaf is unpublished, apart from the Boerner catalogues, which is surprising for such an interesting and unusual miniature.

Boerner Auction Catalogue CX, 1912

On a couple of occasions in past blogs I have referred to the catalogue of an auction held in Leipzig in November 1912 by C.G. Boerner.

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.

An Addendum to "Adalbert Freiherr von Lanna (1836-1909) of Prague"

The previous post was inspired by a leaf that was sold as lot 384 in the Lanna auction at Stuttgart in 1910. Anne Korteweg has kindly contacted me to let me know that lot 385 in the same sale -- apparently from the same manuscript -- is now at the Rijksprentenkabinet at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam:

RP-T-1948-381 [Source]

Adalbert Freiherr von Lanna (1836-1909) of Prague

On a recent visit to Sotheby's I was shown a lovely leaf from a Book of Hours, with a small miniature depicting St Margaret, and a border with a cherub and centaur:

Manuscripts from St-Jacques, Liège [Part II]

St-Jacques, Liège, c.1735 [Source]

Online searches locate several fully or partially digitised manuscripts from St-Jacques, including Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Riant 35 (description here; digitisation here), which has an ownership inscription and title on the front flyleaf:

"Liber monasterij s(an)c(t)i Jacobi leodie(n)s(is)"
Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Riant 35, f. i verso [Source]

and shelfmarks "G.91" and "E.30", comparable to those in the Peter Lombard manuscript (discussed in the previous post), on the first page of text:

[Source]

It also has a note at the back, recording that it was bought in 1426:

"Liber m(ona)sterij s(an)c(t)i Jacobi in i(n)sula leodien(sis)
que(m) acquisivit e[?] p(ri)or de (commun)i bursa ecc(les)ie
in a(n)no d(omi)ni M° cccc xxvj° p(ro) tribus griffonib(us)"
Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Riant 35, f.124r [Source]

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.

Donato and Ercole de Silva

When cataloguing the pre-1500 manuscripts of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia recently, I needed to identify the owner of an Italian ink-stamp, in a copy of Macer, De virtutibus herbarum, in the form of a seal with the legend "COMES DONATUS SILUA":

and so I was pleased to discover that two of the standard reference books are available online:

(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]

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)":

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 Duprat Bible [Part I]

The so-called "du Prat atelier" of 13th-century Parisian illuminators was named by Robert Branner after a luxurious large (c.440×320mm) Bible that is now in Boston Public Library (MS. f. Med. 104):

Boston, Public Library, MS. f. Med. 104, vol.IV, fols.434v-435r

Parts of its recent provenance are well known, but thanks to images taken by Lisa Fagin Davis I have been able to fill in much of the gap between the 16th century and 1830.

The Bible of Louis de Harcourt (d.1479), Patriarch of Jerusalem and Bishop of Bayeux

In a few weeks' time a well-known dealer will open an exhibition of manuscripts at his gallery in central London. He tasked me to check and revise the existing descriptions, and I undertook to amplify them with new research where possible. This led to some satisfying discoveries, some of which I may post about in the coming weeks.

One of them arose from my recent investigations for this blog of the manuscripts in the 1926 Brölemann-Mallet auction catalogue, several of which were bought by Messrs William Permain for William Randolph Hearst.

English Book Sale Catalogues 1801–1900: A Preliminary Version

Just a few days after publishing the previous post I happened, by pure chance, to discover that a preliminary draft of the long-awaited continuation of Munby and Coral's work has very recently been made available online thanks to Annette Fern. It had been on the website of the Bibliographical Society of America for less than a week, and there has not yet been a formal announcement.

It consists of a chronological list of about 17,500 different catalogues of sales from January 1801 to December 1900, and locations of extant copies of those catalogues in about 150 libraries in the UK and USA.

Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676–1900

One of the most useful tools for provenance research on medieval manuscripts has been made available for online consultation and download:

List of Catalogues of English Book Sales, 1676–1900, Now in the British Museum (London, 1915)

Hearst's Other Brölemann-Mallet Manuscripts

As related in the previous post, the Beauvais Missal was bought at the Brölemann-Mallet sale in 1926 by Permain on behalf of William Randolph Hearst. Lest there be any doubt that Permain was acting for Hearst, we can look at the other manuscripts bought by Permain at the Brölemann-Mallet sale, and find that they all later belonged to Hearst, and were all listed in the 1941 Gimbel-Saks-Hammer catalogue.

Even where the attributions to a country or century are incorrect, or absent, positive identifications can be made based on other features such as the dimensions and numbers of leaves: