Beschreibung:

A funeral scene, miniature on a leaf from a Book of Hours, Use of Paris, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on parchment [France (probably Paris), c. 1440] Single leaf, with large miniature of a funeral scene in which the priest reads from an open book dolefully, as two men lower a body stitched into a shroud into an open grave before mourners, all before a medieval church, within thin gold arch-topped frame, above 3-line initial in blue heightened with white penwork, enclosing foliage and on burnished gold grounds, and 4 lines of text with capitals touched in yellow, red rubrics and coloured panels with gold circles forming line-fillers, full decorated border of densely packed acanthus leaves and rinceaux foliage terminating in gold and coloured leaves and seed-pods arranged around gold and coloured double bars, blue inkstamp of Kushelev-Bezborodko in lower outer margin (see below), verso with 16 lines as before with one-line initials in gold on burgundy or blue grounds, small spots and stains, else excellent condition, 180 by 120mm. Provenance: 1. From a Book of Hours owned in the eighteenth century by 'Mr Jourdan Secrétaire de Mgnr l'ancien Evêque de Limoges Precepteur des Enfans de Françe', and passing thence to several Russian libraries before coming into the collection of Count Nicholai Alexanderovich Kushelev-Bezborodko (1834-1862), an art collector who inherited his father's large art collection and substantially added to it during a long tour of Europe after the Crimean War, but cut short by his untimely death; much of his collection surviving in the Kushelevskaya Gallery in the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg: his small inkstamp in corner of this leaf. 2. The codex sold Christie's, 7 December 1988, lot 22 (then imperfect and with only three miniatures). 3. Reappearing Sotheby's, 5 December 2000, lot 61, and then dispersed. 4. This leaf acquired from North American trade in 2005.