Book of Hours
Artist
Workshop of Boucicaut Master
(French, active early 15th century)
Dateca. 1412
MediumTempera and gold leaf on vellum
DimensionsOverall: 8 × 6 inches (20.32 × 15.24 cm)
Credit LinePurchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Object number34-303/1
On View
Not on viewCollections
DescriptionFour illustrations: The Flight into Egypt, King David as Psalmist, The Crucifixion, The Last JudgmentThe Flight into Egypt (in quire 10): Introducing vespers, the image takes place in a scooped-out landscape rising to a hill on the right and a tree on the left. The figure of Joseph has coarse features and wears a cloak and cap an d is armed with a keg, staff, and purse.
Kind David as Psalmist (in quire 12): God is placed in the left corner and David, praising God, is looking up at him from the right. The foreground landscape recedes into space.
The Crucifixion (in quire 13): Heading the section of the book called the Hours of the Cross, this image eliminates all landscape references with only a narrow strip of gently rising ground along the bottom.
The Last Judgment (in quire 15): Christ sits on a rainbow, and his feet rest on an orb. His right arm is raised in judgment. An angel on either side holds an instrument on the Passion (the column and cross). The artist's tendency toward simplicity has led him to eliminate the customary small souls climbing out of graves and therefore, Christ is left with on one to judge.Exhibition History
N/A
Books of Hours, especially popular in the late Middle Ages, were private prayer books for lay people. They included texts meant to be read at certain hours of the day, illustrated by exquisitely painted miniatures with elaborate borders, as in this example. The Boucicaut Master, the leading French practitioner of manuscript illumination in the early 1400s, supervised a workshop of illuminators who produced manuscripts for the king of France, the aristocracy and a wealthy merchant class. This book originally comprised up to eleven miniatures, all but four of which were removed, probably in the 19th century.
Purchased
from Frank Glenn, Kansas City, MO, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas
City, MO, 1934.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 27, 139, (repro.), as attributed to the workshop of the Boucicaut Master, as King David as Psalmist.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 43, (repro.), as attributed to the workshop of the Boucicaut Master, as King David as Psalmist.
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