Anonymous English illuminators - photo 1
Anonymous English illuminators - photo 2

Anonymous English illuminators

Lot 82
12.12.2022 00:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Sold
£ 2 142
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 869488
Lot 82 | Anonymous English illuminators
Estimate value
£ 3 000 – 5 000
Anonymous English illuminators
Leaf of the ‘Whitby Psalter’, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum [England, probably York, late third or early fourth quarter 13th century].
As fine an example of English Gothic script as one could hope to acquire.

c. 240 × 180mm. 19 lines in very high-grade formal gothic script written between rulings for the both the tops and bottoms of minims, the text comprising psalms 77:42–57 (‘non sunt recordati […] in arcum p(er)vum’ [sic]), each verse decorated with an illuminated initial alternately gold with blue flourishing or blue with red flourishing, and most verses followed by a line-filler in all three colours (the margins are rather narrow, with the loss of some tiny extremities of pen-flourishing, having been cropped by the 18th century, but otherwise in very good condition)

Provenance:
(1) The script and decoration are clearly English (despite previous attributions to France and Flanders), and the Psalter was made for a secular church in the diocese of York, to judge by the saints in the litany (Nigel Morgan, English Monastic Litanies, II, Henry Bradshaw Society, CCX (2013), pp. 28–29), and by the following petition ‘Ut archiepiscopum nostrum […]’. The manuscript is inaccurately known as ‘The Whitby Psalter’ due to an added inscription that attributes it to the Benedictine abbey of St Hilda, Whitby (St Hilda is in the litany).
(2) The parent volume must have been dismembered by the mid-18th century, when the largest surviving part (28 leaves) was owned by the Leeds antiquary Thomas Wilson. It was later in the collections of Katharine Blanche Starkie (d. 1883), an intrepid Victorian widow who wrote books about her 19th-century travels across Russia and India, accompanied by ‘three children, three nurses, two Irish setters, a terrier, and two goats’; and of Lt.-Col. W.E. Moss, in whose sale at Sotheby’s, 2 March 1937, it was lot 1172; it is now at the Houghton Library (MS Lat. 394). Single leaves are at the Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (MI), the Beinecke Library (2 leaves in the Takamiya Collection, and 4 more in the Keynes Collection), the University of Notre Dame (Snite Museum), and one that was formerly Folio Fine Art, Catalogue 75 (1970), no. 256 (ill.) and Maggs, Ancient Mediæval and Modern 14, Catalogue 973 (1976), no. 160, pl. VII.
(3) Colker MS 208; acquired in 1972 from Maggs.

The manuscript is described in a blogpost dated 26 March 2022 at mssprovenance.blogspot.com and a list of the known leaves is at mssprovenance.blogspot.com/p/the-whitby-psalter.html
Genre:Religious genre
Place of origin:United Kingdom
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
Preview
28.11.2022 – 12.12.2022
Phone +44 (0)20 7839 9060
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