Leaf from a lavish English Psalter, once claimed by Bruce Ferrini to have been “from the court of Philip Augustus”, in Latin c.1260

Leaf from a lavish English Psalter, once claimed by Bruce Ferrini to have been “from the court of Philip Augustus”, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum

[Northern England, c. 1260-70]    

Single leaf, ruled in faint red for a single column of 21 lines of a fine early-Gothic bookhand, catchword at foot of reverse, small initials in alternate dark blue and liquid gold, with penwork line-fillers in same, one large illuminated initial ‘I’ (opening “Iubilate domino …”, Psalm 100) and another ‘D’ (opening “Dominus regnavit …”, Psalm 99) in gold, enclosing swirling gold penwork with blue dots, and enclosed within ornate blue penwork with long trailing extensions filling the upright border, gold crackled with small scuffs, overall in excellent condition, 235 by 167mm.

The parent manuscript of this glorious manuscript was owned by Bruce Ferrini and offered by him and Les Enluminures in their ‘Important Illuminated Manuscripts’ (2000), no. 14 at $1,000,000 (described there as from northern France, and the last part of the reign of Philip Augustus). However, when it went unsold there, Ferrini began to sell individual leaves (with a leaf in a private collection by July 2002), continuing its dispersal until at the end of his life he sold cuttings of it line-by-line as ‘bookmarks’. In 2016, the emergence of a leaf with an initial allowed the re-attribution of the work to northern England (see Sotheby’s, 5 July 2016, lot 5, noting that the closest parallels were Psalters from Northern England, such as the Evesham, Oscott, York and Rutland Psalters, all dating to c.1250-1270).