From an Early 15th Century Glittering Manuscript Book of Hours, A Gorgeous Miniature from the Workshop of the Great Parisian Artist, the ‘Bedford Master’, Likely Created During the Era of the English Seizure of Paris in the Hundred Years’ War

A Pentecost scene

The Bedford Master and his prolific workshop were perhaps the first commercial workshop to operate from Paris. Paris was one of only a few pre-eminent centers of art production in Europe in the late Middle Ages. However, that opinion is based for illuminated manuscripts on the numerous production of Books of Hours and other similar works in the second half of the fifteenth century. Earlier in the century, when the present leaves were copied and illuminated, Paris simply did not have that dominance of the art world, and its ultimate success was to be intertwined with the political instability of the early decades of the fifteenth century.

The Bedford Master sat at the center of this, and indeed his modern name comes from a gloriously illuminated Book of Hours (now British Library, Addit. 18,850). This particular book at the British Library seems to have begun as a work commissioned by a member of the French royal family or similarly grand patron, but work on the volume came to a halt on the invasion of northern France by Henry V of England in 1415, which captured the city of Harfleur and secured victory at Agincourt. His allies, the Burgundians, took Paris in 1418, and the count of Armagnac (acting as senior French official in the city) and at least a thousand of his followers were massacred. The English continued to secure their beachhead in Normandy, and finally marched into Paris in 1421. Many of the artists of Paris fled the besieged city, and we can trace the impact of the Bedford Master’s style in regional productions in the north of France for the next few decades as artists presumably fled home. In Paris itself, this book commission was rekindled, with the volume rebranded for none other than John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford, and regent in France for his nephew Henry VI of England. His arms were added to it as well as a wonderfully detailed ownership portrait, with him kneeling before St. George. It was this willingness of the English invaders to adopt the arts in Paris previously patronized by their political predecessors, the French crown and nobility, that ensured the continuance of the city as an artistic hub, and allowed that center to keep growing in importance at just the moment is might have faltered.

The present leaf comes from a parent-manuscript most probably produced around the height of this crisis, for a patron in English-occupied-Normandy (the use of the prayers is of Rouen, and both Taurinus, bishop of Evreaux and Ouen of Rouen were to be found in the Calendar), and the art-style has been linked specifically to a small group of artists who worked in the Bedford Master’s atelier on another volume, now Colegio Escuelas Pías in Zaragoza (attributed by Gregory Clarke, see also: Planas Badenas and Docampo Capilla, Horae: El poder de la imagen, 2016, no. 7 and M.H. Cuesta, Libro de horas de los Escolapios, siglo XV, 2011) suggesting its production in the 1420s or 1430s. A prayerbook of this refinement and quality was certainly made for a patron of significant influence and wealth. As northern France remained firmly in the grip of the English until the 1440s, with the tide of war not really changing until the death of Joan of Arc in 1431 and the French unable to retake Rouen until 1449, the parent volume of these leaves may well have been produced for a member of the English occupying forces in Normandy. Otherwise its history is obscure, with the volume emerging in the collection of the American historian and Lincoln collector, Justin G. Turner (1878-1976).

[Paris, c. 1420]; Leaf on vellum, approx. 180 x 130mm., with a historiated initial and three sided border of gold bars with colored foliage overlaid, within densely packed colored swirls of single-line foliage ending in colored and gold flowers and leaves, sprays of acanthus leaves at each corner of text frame, text in single column of 14 lines with red rubrics (in French) and one-line initials in gold, red or blue, slightly cropped at edges, else excellent condition.