The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France

A prayer book barely the size of a modern smartphone, painted almost entirely in shades of grey for a queen of France between 1325 and 1328, and now recognised as the surest surviving example of the hand of Jean Pucelle, the most consequential Parisian illuminator of his generation. Its 209 vellum leaves carry 25 full-page grisaille miniatures and roughly 700 further images, run in facing pairs of Passion and Infancy scenes borrowed from the format of contemporary ivory diptychs, with a marginal world of beggars, drolleries, and games running underneath that recent scholarship reads as a deliberate commentary on the pictures above.

Its ownership can be documented in short, well-lit stretches separated by long stretches of dark. It passed, on strong but not undisputed evidence, from the queen to Charles V, then by an unrecorded route into the library of Jean, Duke of Berry, who by 1401 had it catalogued as 'the Hours of Pucelle.' After his death in 1416 it disappears for two centuries, resurfaces only as a coat of arms stamped into a rebound cover, disappears again, and does not reappear in the documentary record until it turns up in a nineteenth-century Rothschild collection.

It was seized by German occupation authorities from the Rothschild family in 1940, found by an American Monuments officer in a Bavarian castle in 1945, restituted in 1948, and sold to the Metropolitan Museum in 1954 - the acquisition that broke the museum's own standing policy against buying manuscripts. It has been on public view at the Cloisters ever since.

An object made to fit in one hand

The first fact about this manuscript is its size. Each vellum leaf measures 9.2 by 6.2 centimetres, and the bound volume with its covers is 9.9 by 7.2 by 3.8 centimetres - smaller than most modern passports, and thin enough with its 209 leaves to sit comfortably in a closed fist. The vellum itself is described in the technical literature as exceptionally thin and nearly transparent, which is part of why the grisaille painting on the recto of a leaf can be made out, faintly, through the verso.

Scale here is not incidental. This was made to be held a few centimetres from the face, read and looked at by one person, in private, for a devotional practice - the recitation of the Hours of the Virgin at fixed points across the day - that a fourteenth-century queen consort would have performed daily. A book this small could not function as furniture or display; it functioned as an object of touch and repeated private attention, which is also why, unlike a large altarpiece, it could travel, be inherited, be hidden in a wastepaper basket, and survive.

Grisaille: painting in the absence of colour

Twenty-five full-page miniatures and the great majority of the roughly 700 further illustrations are painted in camaieu gris - grisaille, a monochrome technique built up in washes and highlights of grey and white ink and paint, with colour reserved for small accents: touches of lilac and turquoise in drapery, pink in flesh, and gold leaf used sparingly rather than as a ground. The effect, repeatedly noted since the manuscript's rediscovery, is sculptural: figures read as small carved reliefs rather than flat painted shapes, an effect grisaille was well suited to produce because it removes colour as a competing signal and leaves modelling in light and shade to do the work of describing form.

This was a technical choice, not an economy. Grisaille miniatures took specialist skill to execute well, and Pucelle's grisaille work in this manuscript is the example against which the rest of his output, and the output attributed to his workshop, is measured.

The paired-page format and the debt to ivory

Eight of the full-page openings are arranged as facing pairs: a scene from the Passion of Christ on the left-hand page opposite a scene from the Infancy of Christ on the right. This pairing of the sorrowful and the joyful mysteries on facing leaves is not native to manuscript illumination - it is borrowed from the format of small Parisian ivory diptychs of devotion that were being carved in the same city in the same decades, which folded shut on hinges to protect two facing scenes exactly like these.

The borrowing tells us something about how this book was meant to be used and understood: as an object continuous with a wider Parisian luxury trade in small devotional things - ivories, goldsmiths' work, small panel paintings - rather than as a manuscript operating in isolation from the other portable arts a court patron would have owned.

An Italian education, delivered through Duccio and Strasbourg

Pucelle's figures are more spatially and physically credible than the flat, linear figures of the Parisian illumination that came before him - deeper drapery, weight placed convincingly on a hip or a foot, interiors suggested by receding architecture rather than a flat gold or patterned field. Scholarship since the mid-twentieth century has traced this to direct or indirect contact with Italian trecento painting: Kathleen Morand and later commentators point to passages that recall Duccio's Maesta, completed in Siena in 1311, close enough in date that a Parisian illuminator could plausibly have seen drawings, prints, or the work itself through the trade in luxury goods between Italy and France.

Karen Gould's 1992 study in the Art Bulletin adds a second, non-Italian source for the same modelled, three-dimensional figure style: the sculpture of Strasbourg Cathedral. Gould argues that specific figures and iconographic choices in this manuscript and in the related Miracles de Notre Dame manuscript draw directly on the Strasbourg carvings, and further proposes that Pucelle himself designed the south narthex window at Strasbourg - a claim, if accepted, that would place him working across media (glass as well as vellum) and would explain the sculptural quality of his figures as the habit of a designer who thought in three dimensions rather than only in line. The Italian and the Strasbourg readings are not mutually exclusive; both describe an illuminator absorbing forms from outside the flat Parisian tradition he inherited and fusing them with it.

Saint Louis, poverty, and a discourse in the margins

Alongside the Infancy and Passion cycles, the manuscript carries scenes from the life of Louis IX, Jeanne d'Evreux's canonised ancestor, canonised in 1297 and already the subject of a small body of hagiography by the 1320s. Three of these scenes show the sainted king in acts of charity toward the poor, drawn from the near-contemporary Lives of Louis then circulating at court.

Gerald B. Guest's 1995 study in Viator argues that the marginal figures running beneath these three miniatures are not decorative filler but a deliberate visual gloss on the scenes above: a set of beggars and poor figures positioned, repeatedly, at the edge of the frame, excluded from the charity taking place within it. Guest reads this as a fourteenth-century discourse on who counted as a deserving object of charity and who did not - an argument made in the margins, in visual terms, running alongside the pious central image of a royal saint's generosity. This is a scholar's reading of the material, citable and specific, not a claim about what Pucelle or his patron privately believed; Guest names the ambivalence as something the pictures do, and does not claim it as anyone's stated intention.

Games in the margins: Randall's reading of the drolleries

Close to 700 illustrations run through the manuscript's margins and initials: bishops, beggars, street dancers, musicians, apes, rabbits, dogs, and invented hybrid creatures, the standard repertoire of Gothic marginalia but here unusually dense for so small a book. Lilian Randall's 1972 study in Speculum argued that specific bas-de-page scenes are not random drollery but carry a considered relationship to the miniature above them. Her example: beneath the Annunciation, facing the Arrest of Christ across the opening, the margin shows a group of young people playing a game in which one figure sits on the ground while the others provoke him into giving chase - a game of teasing and pursuit set directly opposite an image of Christ's own arrest and pursuit by his captors.

Randall's is an argued reading of a real pattern in the images, not a decoding of hidden symbolism; she demonstrates the correspondence image by image rather than asserting a single master key to the whole cycle. Where a margin scene has no demonstrated relationship to its miniature, this record does not manufacture one for it. Most of the marginalia in a manuscript this large is exactly what it looks like: the fashionable ornamental vocabulary of the period, deployed because it was expected in a luxury commission of this kind, not because every rabbit conceals a doctrine.

A queen who collected and gave away books

Jeanne d'Evreux was Charles IV's third wife, married in 1325; he died in February 1328 without a surviving son, ending the direct Capetian line. Joan A. Holladay's 2006 study of fourteenth-century French queens as book collectors places this manuscript inside a wider, documented pattern: Jeanne d'Evreux assembled a substantial personal library over her long widowhood - she outlived Charles IV by more than forty years, dying in 1371 - and her will records her distributing individual books by name to specific relatives and friends, a practice Holladay reads as evidence of real personal attachment to particular volumes rather than a formal disposal of undifferentiated property. This manuscript's small scale and intensely private character - a book for one pair of hands, not a chapel or a hall - fits that pattern of a queen's book collection more comfortably than it fits a purely dynastic or diplomatic commission.

The 1371 will, and a doubt raised by the Museum's own scholars

Shortly before her death on 4 March 1371, Jeanne d'Evreux dictated a will that bequeaths to Charles V - by then king - 'un bien petit livret d'oroisons que le roy Charles, dont Dieu l'ame, avoit faict faire pour Madame, que pucelle enlumina': 'a very small prayer book which King Charles, may God keep his soul, had made for Madame, which Pucelle illuminated.' This sentence is the single strongest piece of evidence connecting the artist's name to any specific book owned by Jeanne d'Evreux, and it is the sentence usually cited to identify the will's 'petit livret' with this manuscript.

The identification is not universally accepted. Elizabeth Flinn, writing in the Metropolitan Museum's own 1971 Bulletin devoted to Pucelle, dissented from it. The will calls the object a prayer book (livret d'oroisons), not a book of hours in the terms usually used for this genre; the manuscript itself carries none of Jeanne d'Evreux's heraldry on its pages, unlike other manuscripts securely linked to her queenship; and the calendar contains more than thirty misspelled saints' names and roughly fifteen incorrect feast days, an unusual number of errors to leave uncorrected in an object commissioned for a queen. None of these points disproves the identification, and the majority of subsequent scholarship - including the Museum's own current cataloguing - treats this manuscript as the book named in the will. But the doubt was raised inside the institution that now owns the object, on codicological grounds, and this record keeps it visible rather than smoothing it away.

Into the royal library, and a change of clothes

If the will identification is accepted, the book entered Charles V's possession at Jeanne d'Evreux's death in 1371 and appears nine years later in the 1380 inventory of his jewels and small treasures, described in enough physical detail to be unmistakably this object: 'ung livre a ungs aiz de brodeure, dont les perles ont este ostees, aux armes de la royne Jehanne d'Evreux, ou d'un coste est l'ymage de Nostre Dame, et d'autre, l'Annonciacion, et dedens sont les Heures a l'usaige des jacobins, et a deux fermoirs d'or' - a book with an embroidered cover, from which the pearls have been removed, bearing the arms of Queen Jeanne d'Evreux, showing the image of Our Lady on one side and the Annunciation on the other, containing Hours in the Dominican (Jacobin) use, with two gold clasps. This is the earliest surviving physical description of the object as a bound book, and it already records that its original pearl-set cover had been stripped by 1380.

By whatever route - the 1380 inventory belonged to Charles V, who died that same year and whose library passed first toward his son, the future Charles VI, and only later, by mechanisms this record's sources do not spell out, into pieces of his uncle Jean, Duke of Berry's collection - the book had reached the Duke of Berry by 1401-02, when his own inventory, published by Jules Guiffrey, records it as: 'Item une petites heures de Nostre Dame, nommee Heures de Pucelle, enlumees de blanc et de noir, a la usaige des Prescheurs' - a little hours of Our Lady, called the Hours of Pucelle, illuminated in black and white, in the use of the Preachers (the Dominicans). The same entry, or an annotation associated with it, records that the binding was changed to blue silk in 1402. This is the earliest instance of the artist's name being attached to the book in a documentary source, some seventy years after the manuscript was painted - close enough in time that the name recorded may reflect a real, remembered attribution rather than a later scholarly guess.

Two silences: 1416 to the seventeenth century, and beyond

Jean, Duke of Berry died in 1416, one of the great bibliophile collections of the age, and this manuscript is not traceable in any inventory or record for roughly two hundred years afterward. It resurfaces only through physical evidence on the object itself: the current leather binding carries two coats of arms identifying Louis-Jules de Chatelet and his wife, Christine de Gleseneuve Bar, who married in 1618 and were both dead before 1672. Nothing in the sources consulted for this record explains how the book passed from the Duke of Berry's library, or wherever it went after his death, into the hands of a seventeenth-century French noble couple: the binding proves ownership, not the route by which ownership was acquired.

A second, only slightly shorter silence follows. Between the Chatelet couple's deaths, before 1672, and the manuscript's documented appearance in a Rothschild collection in the nineteenth century, no owner, sale, or location is recorded in any source consulted for this record. That is close to two centuries unaccounted for, on top of the two centuries already unaccounted for between 1416 and 1618-72. Very little about this manuscript's ownership between the death of the Duke of Berry and the rise of the Rothschild collections can be stated as fact, and this record does not attempt to bridge either gap with inference.

A name in dispute: which Rothschild, and how

The manuscript is documented in the nineteenth century as part of a Rothschild family collection, and here the sources consulted for this record disagree with each other on a specific point. General reference summaries, echoing the manuscript's own Wikipedia entry, name Alphonse de Rothschild of Geneva as the collector who acquired it, with the collection passing at his death in 1900 to his nephew, Maurice de Rothschild, in Paris. Christopher de Hamel's specialist study of Rothschild manuscript collecting, as reported in Timothy Graham's 2006 review in The Medieval Review, instead names Adolphe de Rothschild as the collector who acquired this manuscript. Alphonse and Adolphe de Rothschild were two distinct members of the same banking family active in the same period, and this record has not been able to resolve, from the sources consulted, which of the two the surviving documentation actually supports. What both accounts agree on is the endpoint: by the early twentieth century the book belonged to Maurice de Rothschild in Paris.

Confiscation, a wastepaper basket, and a Monuments officer

The manuscript was confiscated from the Rothschild family's holdings by German occupation authorities following the fall of France in 1940, part of the wider organised plunder of Jewish-owned art collections conducted through the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. It was transported to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, which the ERR was using as a storage and administrative centre for looted French collections, complete with the card catalogues and object files documenting what had been taken and from whom.

In April 1945, Second Lieutenant James Rorimer, an American Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officer who would later become the Metropolitan Museum's curator of medieval art and then its director, found this manuscript along with two other illuminated books - among them the Belles Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry - left behind in a wastepaper basket by retreating German personnel. The book was restituted to Maurice de Rothschild in 1948.

To the Cloisters, and a policy overridden

The manuscript came onto the New York art market in 1953, when Maurice de Rothschild began selling parts of his collection, and was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum the following year. James Rorimer, by then a curator at the Museum and the same officer who had found the book in Bavaria eight years earlier, is credited with persuading the institution to set aside its usual policy against acquiring manuscripts in order to secure this one. The purchase price has not been located in any source consulted for this record; the credit line records only 'The Cloisters Collection, 1954,' and the accession number, 54.1.2, itself records the year.

The manuscript has remained in the Museum's medieval collection at the Cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park, New York, since 1954, and is usually on public display there - meaning that for most of its documented life since 1954 it has been more continuously accessible to the public than at almost any point since it was painted.

What the calendar itself does not resolve

The manuscript's own calendar sits awkwardly against its royal commission. Its saints follow the use of the diocese of Paris, while the hours proper follow Dominican (Jacobin) practice, a combination consistent with a book made in Paris for someone with a personal or family attachment to the Dominican rite. But the calendar also carries, by the count reported in the scholarly literature, more than thirty misspelled saints' names and roughly fifteen incorrect feast days - an unusually high error rate for a manuscript this lavishly illuminated and, on the accepted identification, made for a queen. Ten folios in the manuscript carry no ornamentation at all, suggesting the illumination programme was, in some narrow sense, left incomplete. None of the sources consulted for this record offer a settled explanation for either fact; they are recorded here as unresolved features of the object rather than folded into a smooth narrative of flawless royal production.