Six miniatures from a Book of Hours, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Flanders, probably Bruges or Ghent, c.1460].

Workshop of the Master of the Ghent Privileges
Six miniatures from a Book of Hours, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Flanders, probably Bruges or Ghent, c.1460].
Six miniatures from a pocket-sized Book of Hours painted in Flanders, whose fine detailing and finish belie their small size.

c.40-50 x 35mm each. The miniatures depicting Sts Andrew, Peter, Katherine, Barbara, Margaret and Christ carrying the Cross, versos preserving up to 10 lines of text from the Suffrages, four with two-line illuminated initials on blue or red grounds with white infilling (all but St Barbara with a vertical slit reaching ⅔ down the centre of the miniature, the faces of St Barbara and Margaret a little rubbed, scattered instances of rubbing and pigment loss elsewhere).

Provenance:
(1) The Book of Hours from which these miniatures derive was painted in Flanders around the middle of the 15th century; the compact text on the versos, which runs up to ten lines, suggest a pocket-sized parent manuscript.
(2) Colker MS 193; acquired in 1971 from Maggs.

Illumination:
The dense, spatially ambitious compositions and fanciful landscapes of these miniatures recall the work of the Master of the Ghent Privileges, one of the leading Flemish illuminators of the second third of the fifteenth century, named after a richly illuminated copy of the Statutes and Privileges of Ghent and Flanders made for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod.2583). The Master was active in Ghent and Tournai, but the present miniatures also have much in common with manuscripts illuminated in Bruges in the third quarter of the 15th century, including the narrative verve and use of an emphatic black line to detail typical of Willem Vrelant.

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