David in Prayer in a Landscape

Description The delicate, painterly style of this image exemplifies the best of Parisian illumination in the first half of the 15th-century. The landscape receding into the distance was a relative novelty at that time. The owners of luxury prayer books enjoyed incidental details such as the shepherds and their flock on the hillside and the individually detailed flowers. The acanthus ornament in the border is especially lush.

Provenance Henry Walters, Baltimore [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Credit Acquired by Henry Walters