Courting couples (meeting of lovers); youth kneeling before a lady; couple embracing; lady holding a dog; bird in the tree; youth with a hawk on his wrist; youth chucking his lover under the chin; offering of the heart.
Four compartments formed by the branches of a tree dividing in the centre.
Masks in the spandrels.
Corner terminals: four lions.
Molinier 1890: France, 14th century.
Koechlin 1924: France, 1st half of the 14th century.
Detroit 1997: French (Paris?), c. 1350-1375.
Attribution
Unknown
Reverse
Label with ink inscription: no. 359.
Comments
This mirror forms a pair with 41.100.160 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Provenance
Frédéric Spitzer collection, Paris (before 1891): sold, Paris, 17 April-16 June 1893, lot 102; Maurice Kann collection: sold, Galerie George Petit, Paris, 5-8 December 1910, lot 221. Georges Dormeuil collection, Paris (after 1910). Private collection, France (1939-2007): sold, Dormeuil sale, Sotheby's, Paris, 19 November 2007, lot 3. Bernard Descheemaeker Works of Art, Antwerp (in 2010).
Bibliography
La Collection Spitzer (Paris, 1890), I, no. 67 (E. Molinier).
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 382; II, no. 1014; III, pl. CLXXVII.
The Middle Ages. Treasures from the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970, in relation to no. 162.
R. H. Randall, Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery (New York, 1985), p. 224.
Images in Ivory. Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. by Peter Barnet, exhibition catalogue, Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts, and Baltimore, The Walters Art Gallery, 1997, fig. 60a.
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003), p. 356.
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