Lot Essay
One of a group of five drawings heightened with watercolor and all depicting scenes from the Old Testament: Cain and Abel and The Sacrifice of Isaac are in the British Museum (1874-6-13-538-9); Joseph held in Slavery, formerly in the Goldschmidt Collection, is now in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; and Elisha cursing his Tormentors is in the Art Institute of Chicago, having appeared, like the present drawing, in the Rodrigues sale. They are all inscribed with letters of the alphabet.
In an attempt to assemble a corpus of work attributable to Jean Poyet of Tours, Mrs. Janet Backhouse underlined the similarity of treatment of the landscapes in the present sheet to those in the Great Book of Hours of Henry VIII, usually called the Heinemann Hours in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, in particular Saint Jerome in the Desert, H8, fol. 170, J. Backhouse, The Tilliot Hours: Comparisons and Relationships, The British Library Journal, II, vol. 19, 1987, p. 211-31. The Heinemann Hours are usually associated with the Tilliot Hours in the British Museum which, along with the Missal of Tours and the Lallemant Hours, represent a coherent group of works closely related in style.
Jean Poyet of Tours was for a very long term considered the author of the Grandes Heures of Anne de Bretagne, now reattributed to Jean Bourdichon. Highly esteemed by his contemporaries, his activity as an artist, which he never developed into an official career, is hardly documented. No mention of his name has been traced after 1500. Poyet's figures are very close to those of Fouquet and indeed Bourdichon. However, it was in the treatment of landscape that he excelled.
The purpose of these drawings has not been clearly established. François Avril describes them: 'tracés avec une sureté souveraine, ces dessins n'étaient pas destinés à illustrer un livre et paraissent avoir servi de maquettes à des compositions de grand format, éclairant ainsi l'activité encore trop malconnue du peintre réputé qu'était Jean Poyet' [drawn with great confidence, these drawings were not meant to illustrate a book and seem to have been used as models for larger compositions, thus giving us an insight into the work of the still little-known artist, Jean Poyet], F. Avril and N. Reynaud, Les Manuscrits à peintures en France 140-1520, Paris, 1994, p. 307. The attribution is still debatable and there is some uncertainty in associating this unusual series with an artist whose work, like most of the book illuminators of the time, was not just restricted to that activity.
In an attempt to assemble a corpus of work attributable to Jean Poyet of Tours, Mrs. Janet Backhouse underlined the similarity of treatment of the landscapes in the present sheet to those in the Great Book of Hours of Henry VIII, usually called the Heinemann Hours in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, in particular Saint Jerome in the Desert, H8, fol. 170, J. Backhouse, The Tilliot Hours: Comparisons and Relationships, The British Library Journal, II, vol. 19, 1987, p. 211-31. The Heinemann Hours are usually associated with the Tilliot Hours in the British Museum which, along with the Missal of Tours and the Lallemant Hours, represent a coherent group of works closely related in style.
Jean Poyet of Tours was for a very long term considered the author of the Grandes Heures of Anne de Bretagne, now reattributed to Jean Bourdichon. Highly esteemed by his contemporaries, his activity as an artist, which he never developed into an official career, is hardly documented. No mention of his name has been traced after 1500. Poyet's figures are very close to those of Fouquet and indeed Bourdichon. However, it was in the treatment of landscape that he excelled.
The purpose of these drawings has not been clearly established. François Avril describes them: 'tracés avec une sureté souveraine, ces dessins n'étaient pas destinés à illustrer un livre et paraissent avoir servi de maquettes à des compositions de grand format, éclairant ainsi l'activité encore trop malconnue du peintre réputé qu'était Jean Poyet' [drawn with great confidence, these drawings were not meant to illustrate a book and seem to have been used as models for larger compositions, thus giving us an insight into the work of the still little-known artist, Jean Poyet], F. Avril and N. Reynaud, Les Manuscrits à peintures en France 140-1520, Paris, 1994, p. 307. The attribution is still debatable and there is some uncertainty in associating this unusual series with an artist whose work, like most of the book illuminators of the time, was not just restricted to that activity.