
Enrica Medugno
Senior Sale Coordinator



Sold for £23,040 inc. premium
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Senior Sale Coordinator

Head of Department
Provenance
Edward E. Ayer (1841-1927).
Bequeathed by the above to the Newberry Library, Chicago, December 1920 (label pasted to endleaf, Or. MS. 214).
Probably deaccessioned from the Library in 1994.
Bonhams, Islamic and Indian Art, 16th October 2003, lot 164.
Private UK collection.
See Sotheby's, Arts of the Islamic World, 15th October 1998, lot 27; and more recently, 26th October 2022, lot 19, for other examples of miniature Qur'ans formerly in Ayer's possession and subsequently in the Newberry Library.
Edward E. Ayer was a Chicago business magnate who made his money in railways. In 1911 he donated part of his collection (which was mostly of Western mediaeval manuscripts, though there were also seventeen thousand items relating to Native American and colonial American history) to the Newberry Library, also giving it an endowment, and sitting on the first Board of Trustees. In 1920 he sold the remainder of his collection to the Library.
The scribe is unrecorded.