Description
This leaf with a miniature of St. John the Baptist and the text of the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel comes from a celebrated manuscript known as the Knyvett Hours (although recently demonstrated to be a Prayerbook not an actual Horae). It once contained thirty-two miniatures, described (albeit unreliably) in 1931 by Quaritch when the book was still extant. Many of the miniatures, including the present one, bear the arms and the initials of the wealthy Knyvett family, and the manuscript was most likely made, as Peter Kidd has suggested, for John Knyvett of Winwick (c. 1322‑1381), who had close royal ties, serving the English Crown as Lord Chief Justice, Lord Chancellor, and as one of the executors of the will of King Edward III. Evidently broken up between 1941 and 1948, many but not all the thirty-two illuminated leaves, as well as some of the text pages, have since entered public and private collections, including The Morgan Library and Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the collection of Bob McCarthy. The style is full of charm and highly idiosyncratic; exact comparisons have not yet been found in existing fourteenth-century English illumination.
Occupying a half page on the verso (once f. 20v), St. John the Baptist is portrayed in a bright red robe, seated on a grassy hill and gesturing to the agnus dei, all before a burgundy-red sky decorated with gold scrollwork and burnished gold clouds at its uppermost edge. This compartment is above another formed of pink, blue, red and burnished gold tiles (the colored ones decorated with white penwork), all within a wide border of gold bars enclosing colored panels divided by a zig-zagging blue and white bar, with coats-of-arms at each corner (clockwise from upper lefthand corner: gules; armed gules and in chief or with four lozenges sable; sable a lion passant gardant sable; and argent a cross gules; with traces of guide-letters probably ‘g’ and ‘v’ next to the last two arms), the colored panels each filled with a letter in gold intended to spell out the name “Knyvett” (sometimes in haphazard order: outer vertical border “kneyft,” inner vertical border: “kneyft,” last letter of previous plus lower border: “k+neyft,” with a remaining “eyf+t” filling the upper border and uppermost compartment of outer vertical border), sprigs of colored foliage and gold bezants emerging from outer edges of frame.
The recto displays 13 lines of text (suffrage to St. Michael the Archangel, opening with 2-line red rubric and “Sancte Michael archangele veni in adiutorio …”) encased on three sides by a vertical text border in blue and gold, with a large initial ‘D’ in blue on colored and gold grounds mounted at its midpoint, text border terminating in single-line foliage at its head and foot, a coat-of-arms hanging from a metal hook next to the text in the outer border (combining the second and third of the those on verso, following our order above), later sketches of an insect and another item (both probably later) above and below this coat-of-arms, prick marks for lines visible at vertical edge of leaf, modern pencil folio number ‘20’ in upper outer corner of recto.
The present leaf is previously known only to scholarship from its black-and-white illustration in the Quaritch catalogue of 1931. The decoration is unusual to the point of eccentric, notably with the alluring kaleidoscopic backgrounds to the miniatures, which have parallels in the bold tessellated backgrounds in two manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguilleville by a single illuminator (New York Public Library, Spencer MS. 19, and Bodleian Library, Laud, Misc. 740: see O. Pächt and J.J.G. Alexander, Illuminated manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, 1966‑73, III, pl. lxxxviii, 925a-b), and an alchemical manuscript compiled for Richard II in 1391 (Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 581: ibid. no. 673, pl. lxx), but as yet no convincing comparison has been made between the miniatures from the Knyvett Hours and any other manuscript. The parent manuscript contained several rare artistic features, such as the vast cycle of thirty-two full-page miniatures, with six consecutive ones devoted to Mary Magdalene, as well as rare textual features, with the inclusion of the Penitential Psalms in rhyming French as well as Latin. It was clearly a highly individual commission, for which the wishes of the original patron may have guided the book’s producers.
Leaves from the Knyvett Hours appear infrequently on the market; the last to do so are those depicting Sants Nicholas and perhaps Barnabas (sold by Sotheby’s, London, for the Berger Educational Trust formerly on deposit in the Denver Art Museum, 23 May 2017, lots 18 and 19); the leaf with St. Christopher (sold in Sotheby’s, London, 2 July 2013, lot 29, and now in the McCarthy collection); and the leaf with St. George (sold in the Korner sale in Sotheby’s, London, 7 July 2007, lot 107). A full description of four leaves in the McCarthy collection, as well as a reconstruction of the book and a detailed discussion of its patronage, is found in Kidd, McCarthy, vol. II, no. 18, pp. 91-98.
Provenance
1. The parent-book of this leaf was a gloriously extra-illuminated Book of Hours or Prayerbok, made in England in the last decades of the fourteenth century. The incorporation of the apparent name “Knyvett” in the borders of some of its miniatures suggests that it was made for a member of that wealthy East Anglian family, but, as has often been noted, the arms here do not point to this family. In 2019, Peter Kidd, in his catalogue of the McCarthy collection leaves, notes that the plain gules arms have in some cases been overpainted and have devices underneath, and in other cases have devices painted on top of them, both allowing for identification as arms used by the Knyvett family (Kidd 2019, no. 18, p. 96). Kidd suggests that the book may have been originally made for John Knyvett of Winwick (c. 1322‑1381), who served the English Crown as Lord Chief Justice, Lord Chancellor and as one of the executors of the will of King Edward III.
2. The parent-book was inscribed “Thys is mistrys marys boke. G.” and “Marset Alouf,” and it has been suggested that Marset was the daughter of John Alouf, a member of Henry VI’s court who received lands in 1438 in recognition of 28 years of service to the king.
3. Rebound in the early sixteenth century in Oxford by Gerard Pilgrim (d. 1536).
4. Thomas Boykott (with his bookplate, dated 1761); then passing to Mrs. Wight-Boycott of Rudge Hall, Pattingham, Wolverhampton, and her sale in Sotheby’s, 3‑5 June 1918, lot 259, to Quaritch.
5. Quaritch, Catalogue of Illuminated and other Manuscripts, 1931, no. 56, and again Catalogue 478, Manuscripts, Aldine etc., 1933, no. 3.
6. H.P. Kraus of New York, bought from Quaritch in 1941.
7. Rudolf Wien of New York, who appears to have broken it up and sold it leaf by leaf over time (with two leaves appearing in Sotheby’s, 9 February 1948, lots 215 and 216, and the leaf owned by Eric Korner sold in Sotheby’s, 19 June 1990, lot 32, bought directly from Wien in 1952). Many leaves have an American provenance, and the present leaf was almost certainly acquired there after 1941 by a Swedish traveler;
8. Private European collection.
Literature
Peter Kidd, The McCarthy Collection, Vol. II: Spanish, English, Flemish, and Central European Miniatures, London, 2019;
Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, London, Catalogue ofValuableBooks,Manuscripts,andAutograph Letters, 3–5 June 1918, lot 259 (“Anglo-French early XVth Century”);
Bernard Quaritch Ltd, A Catalogue of Illuminated and Other Manuscripts Together with Some Works on Palaeography Offered for Sale (London, 1931), no. 56 (“About 1400–1440”);
Bernard Quaritch Ltd, Catalogue 478: A Catalogue of Manuscripts and Printed Books (London, 1933), no. 3 (“About 1400–1440”).