Nicolas Jarry | Le Petit Office de la Vierge Marie, 1661, manuscript on vellum, distinguished provenance

Nicolas Jarry.

Le Petit Office de la Vierge Marie, 1661

16mo (94 x 59 mm.), manuscript on vellum, beautifully written in red and black in roman and italic scripts by Nicolas Jarry, signed on the title “Escrit par N. Jarry Parisien. 1661.”, 97 leaves (title plus 192 pages), heading and 14 lines to a page, each page written within a gold ruled border, the title written in gold on the first leaf within an exquisitely painted wreath of flowers, eight headpieces and eight initials illuminated with decoration of flowers, other initials in gold, red or blue, mid-eighteenth-century French red morocco gilt, doublures of olive morocco with gilt borders, gilt edges, gilt endpapers, blue silk markers, housed in twentieth-century red morocco slipcase and modern half morocco folding case, joints starting

A BEAUTIFUL EXAMPLE OF NICOLAS JARRY'S WORK, WITH DISTINGUISHED PROVENANCE, and finely bound in eighteenth-century red morocco. Nicolas Jarry (c.1615-1670) is regarded as the foremost French calligrapher of his age, famous for the small-format manuscripts produced for the court of Louis XIV. Jarry's devotional manuscripts were "très réclamés par les grandes dames du temps, curieuses de les avoir en poche" (Portalis).

PROVENANCE

Presented by Queen Marie Leczinska (1703-1768, wife of Louis XV and the longest-serving Queen of France to her Polish confessor, Father Bieganski; given by Bieganski to Wacław Piotr Rzewuski (1706-1779), military commander, patron of the arts, and renowned bibliophile (with inscription in Polish to front free endpaper: “This book was given to the Rev. Bieganski by Her Majesty the Queen of France and by him to the Commander Rzewuski.”); given by Count Jarosław Stanisław Potocki to his wife, Countess Maria Potocki in 1811 (née Rzewuska), and given by Countess Maria to her sister, Countess Isabella Grotovich de Waldstein on 24 October 1813 (with second inscription in Polish to front free endpaper: “This was the last gift from my husband given to me in the first days of 1811 and I am giving it today to my beloved sister Izabelli Grotovej de Waldstein. Oct. 24, 1813”); Sir John Kennaway, 4th Baronet (1879-1956), his sale in these rooms, 23 April 1956, lot 65, bought by John Fleming

LITERATURE

Not in census by Baron Roger Portalis, "Nicolas Jarry et la Calligraphie au XVIIe sècle", Bulletin du Bibliophile, 1896