« Mes meilleures heures de Nostre Dame »

In December 2015 the Claire and Michel Lemay Fund of the King Baudouin Foundation acquired a luxurious book of hours. This remarkable manuscript was produced in three phases spread over almost a century. Commissioned in Paris around 1430 and left unfinished, the Tramerie Hours passed through northern France before being fully decorated and illustrated in Tournai in the first quarter of the 16th century.

The book is particularly important for the understanding of Tournaisian art, a signpost for reconstructing the work of a previously unknown local illuminator, the Master of Hugues de Loges.

This book painter, in turn, is the central figure of a little-known chapter in the history of “Flemish” art: book painting in the southern part of the Habsburg Netherlands, at the crucial moment when the Italian Renaissance overturned local traditions rooted in late Gothic art.