Register 1: Coronation of the Virgin; two angels holding navettes and swinging censers, standing on the sides of the bench.
Register 2: Adoration of the Magi.
Pointed trefoils and rounded trefoils.
Dalton 1909: French, late 14th century.
Koechlin 1924: French, 2nd half of 14th century.
Aylesbury 1995: German, Upper Rhine (?), late 14th - early 15th century.
Museum's opinion 2011: German, Upper Rhenish, late 14th - early 15th century.
Attribution
Atelier of the Kremsmünster Master (Koechlin)
Hinges
Traces of two missing hinges on the left side.
Reverse
Smooth and flat. Longer edges slightly chamfered. Ink inscriptions: 'Pugin's sale feb/53' and 'WM' (for William Maskell), '56'; in pencil '14'.
Object Condition
Cracked.
Comments
The left wing of this diptych is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (32.100.203). A complete diptych of similar arrangement and iconography is held in the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum (Aachen), see Van Os 1994, p.75, fig. 29.
Provenance
Collection of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (b. 1812, d. 1852); Pugin sale, February 1853. Collection of Georges Hoentschel (b. 1855, d. 1915), Paris. Collection of William Maskell (b. 1814, d. 1890); British Museum, by purchase, 1856.
Bibliography
O. M. Dalton, Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era in the British Museum (London, 1909), no. 305, pl. LXVIII.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, pp. 304, 325; II, no. 834.
H. van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300-1500, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1994, p. 74, fig. 29.
We Three Kings: The Magi in Art and Legend, exhibition catalogue, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire County Museum, 1995, no. 13.
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