Thy Kingdom Come

ca. 1860-1900

Hand-illuminated on paper

20.3 x 12.7 cm. (mat); 10.3 x 5.6 cm. (illumination)

Beckwith, Victorian Bibliomania catalogue no. 60

Source: The Lord's Prayer

Collection: Anonymous lender

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This unique hand-illuminated Lord's Prayer came from a London tailor, according to the collector, historian and bookseller Robin de Beaumont. In format and design it is an excellent example of a whole cluster of works produced in Britain between the 1860s and the end of the century, when hand-illuminators heeded the call of Ruskin, Humphreys, De la Motte, and others for renewed devotion to this art. Men and women began painting single sheets and multiple-page illuminations of religious and secular texts. The form of many of the religious texts derived from medieval models, but this particular manuscript is more in keeping with the eclecticism seen in High Victorian architecture and printed illuminated works such as Ester Faithfull Fleet's Te Deum Laudamus (cat. 10). [continued below]

Commentary by Alice H. R. H. Beckwith

When nineteenth-century hand-illuminated works were more than one page in length, the text was bound in an album. The album format consisted of illuminations on either vellum or paper sandwiched between two gilt-edged pieces of heavy card with an opening cut out to reveal the inset illumination. Album pages were hinged into the binding to allow for ease in turning. Bindings for hand-illuminated works were often elaborately tooled leather; however, in this Lord's Prayer the covers are undecorated white vellum. The green grosgrain ribbon tiedowns were probably added later. A delicate pink and blue marble paper was used for the end papers. While each of the nine illuminated pages in The Lord's Prayer manuscript is an individual work of art, there are some overall similarities, including the use of Gothic Revival script, precision of images, and the horror vacui seen in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The illuminator of The Lord's Prayer mixed penwork and painting, geometric ornament, and naturalistic detail in the "Thy Kingdom Come" page, illustrated here. Such mixing is characteristic of the entire manuscript and is found in many examples of Victorian easel painting as well.

References

Beckwith, Alice H. R. H. Victorian Bibliomania: The Illuminated Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Exhibition catalogue. Providence. Rhode Island: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1987.

The Lord's Prayer. Seven-page manuscript hand-illuminated on paper. ca. 1860-1900.

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Last modified 23 December 2013