MR. YATES THOMPSON'S ILLUMINATED BOOKS
THESE lines are written before the date at which the second portion of Mr. Yates Thompson's illuminated books are to be sold at Sotheby's. They have no reference therefore to the relative value of the books as realised under the hammer. The intrinsic value of books, however, should not be measured merely by their market price. Splendid as are the French and Italian manuscripts and the eight printed books which are included in the sale, the greatest interest of all has its centre in the fourteen books which show the gay piety of English illumination between the last quarter of the twelfth century and the middle of the fifteenth. Indeed, no other group in all the hundred books to which Mr. Yates Thompson definitely limited his famous collection has quite the same claims of artistic and historical interest as these. They do not, of course, cover the whole range of English illumination. There is no example of the art of outline drawing, which flourished with amazing vigour in England for a century and a half before the Norman Conquest, convicting Mr. G. K. Chesterton of inexactitude when, in a recent number of The London Mercury, he suggests that mediæval illuminators used their paints before they had learned how to draw. The vivacity and grace shown in those early drawings, chastened but not subdued by Continental and Byzantine influences, left traces in English books, and continued to afford a firm groundwork for English illumination for more than three centuries. There are but few examples of them in private hands. Neither has Mr. Yates Thompson any example of the great Winchester School, represented in the tenth century by the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, now the property of the Duke of Devonshire, and in the twelfth by the great Bible at Winchester Cathedral. But English art had its flowering time in the fourteenth century, and its late summer in the fifteenth; and amongst the books offered for sale at Sotheby's are brilliant examples of both these periods.
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Taking the more important of these English books in the order of their date, we have first the Life of St. Cuthbert, with its series of fifty-six lovely full-page miniatures, probably painted at Durham about 1180, a delightful example of a rare type of book. The Apocalypse has an important chapter to itself in the history of painted books, and the late thirteenth-century copy in the collection is one of the finest surviving copies of that favourite picture-book of the Middle Ages. It has much in common with the copy at Lambeth, and Dr. M. R. James traces them both to the same birthplace, probably St. Augustine's at Canterbury. The copy in the sale has no less than 152 miniatures, some of which seem to have been painted in Italy, whence more than six centuries later Mr. Yates Thompson brought it back to England.
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The three fourteenth-century manuscripts in the group are a Psalter of Northern origin, probably written for a member of the Yorkshire family of de la Twyere; an early Sarum Missal, with historiated initials, in which some of the figure-drawing recalls that of Queen Mary's Psalter in the British Museum; and the Psalter of John of Gaunt, to whom it is believed to have been given, perhaps on his marriage with Blanche of Lancaster in 1359. Many of the miniatures in this splendid book are enshrined in Gothic canopies and painted in gold and silver; and the silver, so apt to turn black through oxydization, has on most of these pages kept its lustre. This Psalter is one of the finest examples of English work which has survived from the second half of the fourteenth century. Mr. Yates Thompson confesses that it cost him a bigger price than any other of his books.
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The Hours of Elisabeth ye Quene, so called from the signature of the Queen of Henry VII. written at the foot of one of the pages, is a very rich and beautiful example of that new spirit in English illumination which has been connected with the marriage of Queen Anne of Bohemia to King Richard II. in 1382. Dating from that event, English work for almost the first time takes a character which is quite distinct from contemporary French or Flemish illumination, and the change is attributed to the work and influence of the artists whom the Bohemian princess brought in her train. The strong, clear outline, made by pen or pencil, which had been a tradition from the beginning of English pictorial art, now yields place to soft brushwork. The human figure, which has hitherto been represented by types, assumes individuality and realism. There is found, too, a new character in portraiture, with the features carefully and delicately moulded. The rich borders of books of this period have details unknown in the French work, which, hitherto, has been so nearly akin to that done in England. The kinship can be traced rather to contemporary books painted in Italy and Southern Germany. These English borders are apt to have a certain heaviness in design, especially when compared with the graceful ivy-leaf pattern in French illumination of the same date. Thanks, however, to the greater brilliancy and gaiety of the colouring, which is also a note of the new English style, this heaviness in design is hardly felt. In this Book of Hours the colours, which for the most part are delicate shades of red and blue, heightened with white, and richly gilt, are especially brilliant. The class of illumination which it represents belongs to a limited and distinct period of English art which has yet to be fully explored.
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The group of eight books printed on vellum which follows the English books in the order of lots, and in the catalogue is sandwiched between them and the French and Italian manuscripts, is quite worthy of such good company. These printed books show how deliberately and how successfully the first printers sought to copy the manner and also the special beauty of the finest manuscripts of their own age. Amongst these fine volumes are the Mainz de Officiis of 1466; Peter Schoeffer's Justinian of 1468; an illuminated copy of Jenson's Pliny of 1472—the type of which had so notable an influence on the work of the Kelmscott and Doves Presses; John of Verona's Valturius of 1472, the earliest book to be printed in Italy with Italian woodcuts—and this copy is illuminated too. The group shows how far from vain even in an artistic sense was the boast made in the colophon of one of the earliest Venetian printers that already by his new craft
"Calami superaverat artem."
B. H. N.