
Oliver Cornish
Sale Coordinator for Furniture, Sculpture, Rugs & Tapestries
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Sold for £12,800 inc. premium
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Sale Coordinator for Furniture, Sculpture, Rugs & Tapestries

Head of Department
Provenance
With the present vendor's great grandparents (b.1875 and 1879), Louviers, Normandy.
Thence by family descent.
Abbé R. Delamare has written about Nottingham Alabaster Panels in Louviers. He states that following the persecutions of Henry VIII, the church collected the precious 'Alabaster bas-reliefs of English origin which represent the five main scenes of the passion' and at one point adorned the Saint Martin altar.
Cheetham examines a number of surviving examples of 'Entombment' panels. The most similar to the present lot include a kneeling figure (Mary Magdalene) to the bottom corner with a jar of ointment. The example gifted by W.L Hilburgh, 1946, formerly in the collection of Robert Hillingford, is missing some of the heads of the figures to the top edge but the kneeling figure of Mary Magdalene is intact and wiping the hand of Christ with her long hair. Interestingly there are at least eight recorded English alabaster panels of the subject which show Christ's body being wrapped in a linen cloth, including two examples in the Cluny Museum, Paris and the Statens Historiska Museum Stockholm.
Related Literature
F.W. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, A Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Boydell Press, 2005.
F.W. Cheetham Alabaster Images of Medieval England, Woodbridge, 2003.
F.W. Cheetham The Alabaster Men: Sacred images of Medieval England Daniel Katz, 2001.
F.W. Cheetham, Alabaster Images of Medieval England, Gli Ori, 2001.
F.W. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters, Oxford, 1984.