The Malmesbury Bible [The 1766 Rubempré sale, II]

Last week I suggested that an illuminated Apocalypse in French, previously known to have been sold in the Westerloo sale in 1734, can also be identified in the auction catalogue of the Prince de Rubempré in 1766.

In today's short post I'll show that at least one more manuscript in that sale can be recognised in the same 1766 sale

The Provenance of a 14th-century Apocalypse in French (BL, Yates Thompson MS 10)

In 2010 I contributed the provenance section to a commentary volume that accompanies a facsimile of London, BL, Yates Thompson MS 10, a  illuminated Apocalypse manuscript written in French with 70 miniatures, datable to about 1360-80, of which one is shown above. [1]

The purpose of this blogpost is to summarise very briefly the provenance as I was able to establish it; to make one correction; and to make one addition.

Illuminated Leaves and Cuttings From the Collection of Rodolphe Kann

The only complete list of the leaves and cuttings in the collection is:

Édouard Rahir, Catalogue of the Rodolphe Kann Collection, Objets d’art, I: Middle Age and Renaissance (Paris, 1907), nos. 74-87

For this reason, the items are listed below in order of the Rahir catalogue, using its numbering.

The only art-historical study of a large part the collection is:

W. Suida, ‘Italian Miniature Paintings from the Rodolphe Kann Collection’, Art in America: An Illustrated Quarterly, 35 (1947), 19–33

The vast majority were exhibited at the LA County Museum in 1953-54:

Los Angeles: Mediaeval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts: A Loan Exhibition, November 25, 1953–January 9, 1954, Los Angeles County Museum (Los Angeles, 1953)

One miniature and one initial were bought in 1963 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where they remain.

Several initials were bought by Denys Sutton in 1963, and sold from his collection at Christie's, 4 June 2008, lots 30-34.

The residue of the collection was bought by Norton Simon in 1965, of which a few were donated elsewhere, a few have been kept; the rest were sold at Sotheby's, 8 July 1974, lots 18-24.

The Dispersal of the Collection of Rodolphe Kann [III]: The Illuminations

In a post a few week ago we saw that Rodolphe Kann's art collection was inherited by his son, Edouard, and then sold in 1907 to a partnership of Duveen Brothers and Nathan Wildenstein (whose business partner was René Gimpel, discussed here). Rodolphe Kann's illuminated codices may be the subject of a future blogpost (several are now at the Morgan Library), but for now I am interested in the single leaves and cuttings. 

These illuminations were sold en bloc to Arabella Huntington, the fabulously wealthy widow of the railway magnate Collis P. Huntington (d. 1900) and future wife of Collis's nephew, Henry E. Huntington. When she died in 1924, they were inherited by her son, Archer Huntington, who in 1930 sold them back to Duveen Brothers. 

An Avignon Collective Indulgence of the 1330s?

This week I thought I would expand upon a recent series of tweets on Twitter, as it relates to several of my interests, including copies/forgeries and the examination of physical evidence.

In November last year, Jean-Luc Deuffic tweeted about a forthcoming auction:

He provided a link to the auction site, which shows the full document (though the image resolution is not as high as I would like):

I replied that I thought it had to be a modern copy, and gave a couple of reasons:

One More Montbaston Bible Historiale Cutting

In previous posts (especially here, but also here, and here) I have discussed cuttings from a 14th-century Bible historiale with miniatures attributed to Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston, who who worked in Paris in the second quarter of the 14th century. At least two or three of them were previously owned by Robert Forrer.

In this post I observed that a significant number of items in the 1921 sale of the collection of Rudolf Busch of Mainz had previously belonged to Forrer. Looking at the Busch catalogue again I noticed the cutting shown above.

A Byzantine Miniature on a Leaf from the Forrer Collection

A forthcoming Koller sale has a leaf from a copy of the Gospels in Greek, with the above miniature (24 March, lot 503). 

As the catalogue description expains, the parent manuscript is now Chicago, University Library, MS 129 (de Ricci, Census, I, p. 568). It preserves one miniature, and a colophon from which we know that it was written by Nikolas of Edessa in 1133.