Master of Walters 221 (active 1430s-1440s)
ST SEBASTIAN, miniature on a leaf from a Book of Hours [Western France, ?Rennes, c. 1435]
A sparkling miniature by the Master of Walters 221, an artist named from a Book of Hours in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, usually dated to the 1430s, where St Sebastian appears in a very similar composition.

The miniature, in excellent condition, shows the abortive first attempt at the Saint's martyrdom. It opens a prayer in French (Sonet, Répertoire, no 1888) invoking the saint particularly for protection against the plague: as Sebastian miraculously survived actual arrows so he could help others to survive the metaphorical darts of infectious disease.

The Master of Walters 221 was an important illuminator active in western France, perhaps based in Rennes, who developed Parisian conventions, brought west by the Master of Marguerite of Orléans, into an expressive style combining carefully modelled three-dimensional figures with a sense for surface pattern emphasized by gleaming gold and bright colours (see Diane E. Booton, Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany, Farnham, 2010, pp. 53-58). These continue in the flower and fruit motifs of the full border.

Three other miniature leaves apparently from the same Book of Hours are known: Christ brought before Caiaphas, Entombment of Christ, Christ the Redeemer (Pierre Berès, Manuscrits et enluminures, Catalogue 66, 1975, lots 7-9; Christ before Caiaphas most recently at Sotheby’s, 5 July 2016, lot 36). To these can be added a fourth in the founding collection of the Musée Dobrée, Nantes, with the Pieta (inv. 896.1.4159), which demonstrates that the Book of Hours was already dismembered in the 19th century (P. Charron et al., Trésors enluminés des musées de France, Pays de Loire et du Centre, musées d’Angers, 2013, no 27). Christ’s flesh and the background landscape reveal the hand of the St Sebastian miniature, although behind the saint the Master of Walters 221 enhanced the setting by the intense blue of the naturalistic sky.

Provenance:
•Pierre Berès, Manuscrits et enluminures, cat 66, 1975, lot 10.
Private Collection, Switzerland.
•Jörn Günther, Miniatures and Illuminated Leaves from the 12th to the 16th centuries, Catalogue 6, 2002, no 35.

180 x 141 mm.; written area 109 x 72 mm. Vellum, verso with fourteen lines of text in a Gothic bookhand; leaf trimmed close to borders. Mounted in part gilt frame.

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