Pentecost, miniature on a leaf from the Tarleton Hours, in Latin and French [France (Rouen), c.1430]

single leaf, c.140x105mm, vellum, with a very fine miniature for the suffrage to the Holy Spirit, recto ruled for 21 lines, c.105x65mm, including the last ten lines of a rhyming hymn to the Trinity in French, folio 41 in the parent manuscript, margins cropped close to inner border, professionally mounted

From the collection of Rosy Schilling of Reading; to the present owner.

This leaf belonged to the well-known Tarleton Hours, a manuscript named after the family that owned it between 1784 and 1951. When auctioned at Christie’s, 3 July 1951, lot 50, the manuscript included 35 miniatures which were sold subsequently by Maggs as individual leaves. The remaining body of the manuscript was sold in our rooms, 20 June 1989, lot 58 (including a list of recorded miniatures, the present leaf recorded as priv. coll. Reading; see also our sales, 2 December 2003, lot 69; 3 December 2013, lot 19; 8 July 2014, lot 18; and 2 December 2014, lots 25 and 26, now Harvard, Houghton Library, MSS Lat 450 and 451). The Tarleton Hours was for Sarum Use and was probably made in Rouen in Normandy during the English occupation at the end of the Hundred Years' War. The woman for whom the manuscript was made appears in a miniature with her heraldic arms (Maggs, Bulletin 6, 1969, no.7).

The manuscript was illuminated in two styles, one of which can be identified with the MASTER OF HARVARD HANNIBAL (fl. c.1415-40), including the miniature here. The Harvard Hannibal Master trained and worked in Paris although later he probably moved to Rouen. The striking modelling of faces and the vibrant palette animating his later work is clearly indebted to the work of the Limbourg brothers.