Illuminated Miniature, C15th | Gawain fighting Gloadain the Seneschal, by the Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin?), from a copy of Le livre du Lancelot du lac, in French, illuminated manuscript on vellum. [France (Paris), 15th century (c. 1440s)]

GAWAIN FIGHTING GLOADAIN THE SENESCHAL, ILLUMINATED BY THE DUNOIS MASTER (Jean Haincelin?): a miniature on a cutting from a copy of Le livre du Lancelot du lac, in French, illuminated manuscript on vellum. [France (Paris), 15th century (c. 1440s)]

A cutting, c. 95 × 95mm, trimmed to the gold border of the miniature, the reverse with most of 16 lines of text in gothic script, corresponding to Sommer, 1910, p. 374, lines 17–28, the miniature corresponds to the preceding passages: in an enclosure surrounded by a wooden fence, two knights in full armour and helmets fight, one wielding a sword broken off near the hilt, watched by a young lady, Gawain’s damsel, and five well-dressed men, perhaps including Lionel and the Duke of Cambeninc; some surface rubbing and small losses of pigment, but still bright and attractive; framed, the reverse with a typescript description in German, referring to the Guiron le Courtois manuscript (see Provenance), but not to the Dunois Master.

THE CHIVALRIC PURSUITS OF GAWAIN ILLUMINATED BY THE DUNOIS MASTER

The Dunois Master (formerly known as the Chief Associate of the Bedford Master) is named after a Book of Hours (London, BL, Yates Thompson MS 3) made for Jean d’Orléans, Count of Dunois (d. 1468); as the leading illuminator in Paris in the 1440s, he also illuminated books for such notables as Prigent de Coëtivy, Etienne Chevalier, Simon de Varie, and members of the Jouvenel des Ursins family. The Dunois Master is doubtless identifiable as the ‘Hancelin’ who was paid in 1444 for illuminating the Tristan, Lancelot, and Guiron manuscripts (see Provenance), and that he is the man who is recorded as ‘Jean Haincelin, enlumineur’ in Paris records of 1438 and 1448–49. There is a tantalising lack of concrete evidence but – given these dates, the correspondence of names, and the close stylistic connections between them – it is possible that the ‘Haincelin, demourant à Paris’ recorded from 1403 to 1413 (Rouse & Rouse, 2000) was the Dunois Master’s father, and can be identified as the Bedford Master.

The scene depicted in the miniature illustrates a complex series of events. In brief: Gawain learns that an innocent man, a relative of his damsel, is due to be hanged, on the false testimony of a seneschal, Gloadain, unless a knight can be found to fight on his behalf. Gawain volunteers, and they joust. Their lances break, and they continue fighting with swords, as shown in the miniature, until both are exhausted. (Gawain eventually prevails, and cuts off Gloadain’s head). This is therefore a classic image of medieval chivalry: a knight in armour battling for his damsel and on behalf of the truth, against a treacherous adversary.

PROVENANCE

1. ? Prigent de Coëtivy (1399–1450), admiral of France: in 1444 Prigent paid ‘Hancelin’ the very large sum of more than 90 livres for the illumination of a Roman de Tristan, a Livre du Lancelot del Lac and a Roman de Guiron le Courtois (Delisle, 1900, p. 192); it is likely that the latter is the two-volume copy in Paris (BnF, MS Fr. 356–357; Avril & Reynaud, 1993, no. 7), and the Lancelot was the volume from which the current cutting comes; they were produced by the same scribes and artists.
2. The parent manuscript was apparently cut up by the 16th century and may have had more than 150 miniatures: some of the cuttings are reported to to have numbers as high as ‘152’ written on the reverse ‘in a hand which may be of the 16th century or earlier’ (Jeudwine, 1962, p. 1).
3. The parent manuscript was certainly cut-up by the mid-19th century when 34 miniatures (including this and the following lot) were mounted in a red morocco album ‘with an unidentified, probably French, coat of arms’ (Jeudwine, p. 2), bound by Petit, Paris. Other cuttings from the same manuscript exist which were not bound into this album, including one that is now in Boston (Clark, 2016).
4. JOACHIM NAPOLÉON (1856–1932), PRINCE MURAT, a member of the Bonaparte-Murat family: with his bookplate; sold from the estate of his widow, Marie (d. 1960), daughter of the Duc d’Elschingen, to:
5. Wynne R. H. Jeudwine (1920–1984), Editor of Apollo 1956–59, and collector-dealer in drawings, prints, and books: exhibited and offered for sale individually in London in 1962.
6. Unidentified German-speaking owner, probably before c.1995, with their description on the reverse of the frame.
7. Les Enluminures, exhibited in London in November 2015 and July 2016
8. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1437.

LITERATURE

L. Delisle, ‘Les Heures de l’amiral Prigent de Coëtivy’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 61 no. 1 (1900), pp. 186–200.

H.O. Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, III: Le livre de Lancelot del Lac, Part I (Washington, 1910).

W.R. Jeudwine, Early Fifteenth Century Miniatures, Exhibited at the Alpine Club Gallery, 22 May – 2 June, 1962 (London, 1962), no. 4 (ill.).

F. Avril and N. Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 (Paris, 1993).

R.H. Rouse and M.A. Rouse, “Illiterati et Uxorati”. Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 73–74.

G.T. Clark, in Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections, ed. by J.F. Hamburger et al. (Chestnut Hill, MA, 2016), no 186.