The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux is an illuminated book of hours in the Gothic style. According to the usual account, it was created between 1324 and 1328 by Jean Pucelle for Jeanne d'Evreux, the third wife of Charles IV of France. It was sold in 1954 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where it is now part of the collection held at The Cloisters (accession number 54.1.2), and usually on display.
The book is very lavishly decorated, mostly in grisaille drawings, and is a highly important example of an early royal book of hours, a type of book designed for the personal devotions of a wealthy lay-person, which was then less than a century old. It has been described as "the high point of Parisian court painting", showing "the unprecedentedly refined artistic tastes of the time".
Description
The book is very small: the size of each vellum folio or page is 3 5/8 x 2 7/16 in. (9.2 x 6.2 cm), and the overall size including the current replacement binding is 3 7/8 x 2 13/16 x 1 1/2 in. (9.9 x 7.2 x 3.8 cm). There are 209 folios, with 25 full page miniatures, but many other historiated initials and images in the borders of most pages, so that over 700 illustrations have been counted. Only ten folios have no decoration, just plain text, suggesting that the book was never entirely finished. The vellum is extremely thin, almost transparent, and the text by an unknown scribe is very finely written.
The miniatures use a variety of grisaille drawing in pen known (or at least so called in an inventory that included this work) as "de blanc et noir" and tempera for the other colours. Using both grisaille and colour together is a technique known as “camaïeu gris”. The full-page paintings include cycles of what are always the most commonly found phases of the Life of Christ, the Passion and Infancy. These illustrate the Hours of the Virgin, which is found in some other books of hours, but most unusually they are arranged on facing pages showing a scene from the Passion on the left and from the Infancy on the right, with eight pairs of scenes. However such an arrangement is often found in the ivory diptychs that were being produced in great numbers in Paris at this period. Another cycle shows nine scenes from the life of the Saint-King Louis IX of France decorating the office dedicated to him. Saint Louis was the great-grandfather of both Queen Jeanne and her husband Charles IV, who were first cousins.
The text is unusual in that the saints' days noted in the calendar, and those mentioned in the litany, are clearly those of Paris, featuring all the otherwise obscure local saints one would expect, such as Saint Cloud and Saint Germain. However the rest of the text follows forms typical of hours written for members of the Dominican order. It is possible that two different models were accidentally used by the scribes, though this seems somewhat careless in a major royal commission. But Queen Jeanne was especially close to the Dominicans, so the mixture of texts may be deliberate. Various mistakes in other parts of the book are corrected, which for appearance's sake they often are not in luxury books, but the calendar has no corrections, despite misspelling over 30 saints' names, and giving 15 the wrong feast days.
History and authorship
Although there are dissenting opinions, the book is generally believed to be the work of the leading Parisian illuminator, Jean Pucelle (or Jehan Pucele). It is usually identified with the book mentioned by Queen Jeanne in her will, in which she leaves to Charles V "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 protect him, had made for Madame, which Pucelle illuminated"). The identification of the patrons, illuminator and the date assigned to the work all largely depend on identifying this book with the manuscript in New York, as does any clear conception of what Pucelle's personal style was. However this refers to a prayer book not a book of hours, and it has been doubted that this imprecision would have been likely in such a context. In addition none of Jeanne's heraldry appears in the book, unlike two other royal manuscripts made when she was queen, her Coronation Book and a breviary.