Illuminated page: Woman praying

This page comes from a work in the collection at the Museum of Art in Philadelphia: the so-called Collins Book of Hours. The large-format lighting was detached from the work, produced by the Master of the Collins Hours. This artist worked in Amiens around 1440.  

The Collins Hours in Philadelphia features 26 illuminations surrounded by margins adorned with flowers, foliage, and geometric ornaments, within which figures and grotesques are interspersed.

With the signing of the Treaty of Arras, which restored peace between Charles VII and Philip the Good in 1435, the prominent families of the North commissioned their illuminated works locally, in Picardy. Amiens' pivotal role was enhanced by the presence of Jacques Daret and artists trained in Paris under the Master of the Hours for Marshal Boucicaut. The Master of the Collins Hours is the most remarkable of the artists who gravitate in their wake.

The scene is set in a chapel framed by two slim clusters of columns and covered with a slate roof decorated with gold motifs, punctuated with high pinnacles. The lines emerge against a patch of sky filled with small, irregular silver clouds, typical of the Amiens school.

Inside there is an altar, the space of which is itself limited by rich wall hangings and bright coloured niches.  Dressed in a blue houppelande fur-lined with ermine, a lady – perhaps the patron of the work – kneels on a prie-dieu almost entirely covered in a pink wall hanging with leaf motifs. It is not known whether she is praying to Christ on the Cross hanging in front of the altar or to the Virgin and Child, painted or embroidered, of the altarpiece.  

Certain details allow us to attribute the page to the Master of the Collins Hours: the rich, thick fabrics, the interplay of contrasting colours (blue, red, and green) combined with the pink and white tones of the flesh, in the painter's style. Each page of the book features decorative borders in the margins that relate to the main scene: figures of devotion, various birds, a man walking, and three ladies with elaborate horned hairstyles, reading.