The Agony in the Garden, a large miniature from a Book of Hours, with a text leaf from the same, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on parchment [France (probably Paris, c. 1510-20]

Single leaf, with large miniature of Christ kneeling in the Garden of Gethsemane, while his disciples sleep in the foreground, all within a picketed fence and before a wide open sky, white initial on gold grounds within blue frame and 6 lines of text in an excellent French humanist hand (John 18:1-15 and part of Vespers from Hours of the Virgin) within rectangular text box set in lower part, and the whole within an architectural frame, the reverse and the text leaf with small initial in liquid gold on blue and burgundy and 33 lines in same humanist hand, these framed with gold ropework frames, once damaged in a flood while owned by Boycott Jarman (see below) and retouched and remargined then by Caleb Wing in paper mounts, stains and cockled, overall in fair condition, each approximately 150 by 90mm.

Provenance:
1. From an elegant French Renaissance Book of Hours painted by the Master of Morgan 85, who may be identified as Jean Pichore (C. Zöhl, Jean Pichore, 2004).

2. John Boykett Jarman (c. 1781-1864), the jeweller, with the parent volume damaged in the flood in 1846 that affected much of his collection and caused him to employ the artist Caleb William Wing (1801-75) to restore (and in this case remargin) many of his manuscripts. The parent manuscript was sold in Jarman's sale at Sotheby's, 13 June 1864, lot 30.

3. The complete manuscript offered in Maggs Bros. cat. 397 (1920), no. 198, but then sold leaf by leaf (with the present leaf Maggs, cat. 437 (1923), no. 1150). See M.M. Manion, V.F. Vines and C. de Hamel., Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in New Zealand Collections, 1989, no. 98, pp. 103-04, for other recorded leaves.

4. The miniature here then passing to Otto Petschek (1882-1934), from the prominent Prague family of bankers, mine owners (who in the first part of the twentieth century controlled half of all brown coal mining in Europe) and philanthropists, of Jewish extraction. The family left Czechoslovakia en masse for New York in 1938 as the Nazis began to seize Czech territories that bordered Germany. The export of many of their paintings and much of their graphic collection (of which the miniature leaf here must have formed a part) was legitimised by the local Czech authorities in the first week of January 1939, three months before the Nazis seized control. This leaf then passing by descent to Otto's son, Viktor Petschek (1914-2005), and by descent to his granddaughter.

6. The miniature leaf acquired by Roger Martin directly from Viktor Petschek's granddaughter in 2016, with the text leaf added from another private North American collection in 2017 (with a calligraphic inscribed envelope recording that this leaf had been given by Rossie and A.J. to Bernard Inzel (1922-2002), master engraver, as a Christmas gift in 1980).