This charming miniature shows the touching moment when two sorrowing sisters were reunited. The lives of Elaine and Evaine had followed similar courses. They married two brother kings, Ban of Benoic and Bors of Gaunnes, allies of King Arthur and enemies of the Frankish King Claudas. Elaine was the mother of Lancelot but, as she tended her husband, mortally wounded by Claudas, the infant was seized by the Lady of the Lake. Ban died and the unfortunate queen having lost both husband and son entered the abbey of Moustier Royal. Bors died shortly after his brother and after his sons were seized by Claudas. Evaine resolved to join her sister. Sharing their grief, they lived in Moustier Royale for the remainder of their lives.

The miniature and its parent manuscript are painted in a style associated with a group of secular manuscripts produced in northern France or Belgium, perhaps Thérouanne or Ghent at the end of the thirteenth century: A. Stones, The Illustrations of BN, Fr.95 and Yale 229, 1996.

Provenance:
The parent manuscript is Oxford, Bodl. Lib. MS. Ashmole 828. The defective folio 7 is annotated ‘found defaced in 1830’. Other fragments from the manuscript are Bologna, Arch. Stor., b.1 bis and Turin, Bibl.Naz., L.III. 12

A note in the margin of the present cutting in a 19th-century hand reads, ‘Bought of Malison n[e]x[t] The Change from an old French romance concerning Sir Lancelot’. A bookseller named Malison is recorded in Gerrard St, London in 1806

Sotheby’s, London, 11 December 1972, lot 6.

Physical description:
135 x 140mm (5⅜ x 5½ in.) overall, cut to the shape of the miniature above and at left, the verso with a single column of 13 lines of text in black ink in a gothic bookhand. The text, recounting how, following their reunion in the Royal Minster, the two queens exchange accounts of the loss of their sons is from the Prose Lancelot, H.O. Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, 1910, III, 18.26; A Micha, Lancelot: roman en prose du XIIIè siècle, 1980, VII, 36.

Please note this lot is the property of a private consignor.