Limbourg Brothers: ‘October’, in: Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (15th century); Musée Condé, Chantilly, France

OCTOBER IN PARIS

In the early 1400s, Paris straddled the Seine banks on either side of the Ile de la Cité. Country life started already inside the city walls. Fields stretch all the way to the Left Bank, lined with willows. In the foreground, a peasant in a blue tunic sows seeds, his gesture repeated centuries later by Millet and van Gogh. A full bag waits where he just left his footprints. Birds fight over grain scattered in the neatly ploughed furrows, avoiding the scarecrow archer and the network of threads protecting an already seeded parcel. Another peasant in red uses reins and whip to guide a horse, covered with a white blanket and pulling a harrow weighted down by a stone, in the opposite direction.

Heavy walls, twin towers and the central dungeon of the royal residence of the Louvre dominate the horizon. One small door opens onto the embankment, where friends chat leisurely, people walk their dogs, and washerwomen beat laundry on the steps of a stairway, feet in the water.

We see this miniature view on daily life from the Parisian residence and through the aristocratic eyes of Jean, Duc de Berry, the French king’s brother. It illustrates the calendarium - a monthly list of saints' days – in Jean’s Very Rich Book of Hours, a private devotional collection of prayers to be recited at regular hours. Scenes from the labours of the month, for October tilling and sowing, illuminate each precious calendar page. The solar chariot pulled by winged horses (a nice contrast with October’s heavy workhorse) and the zodiac signs, all in costly gold and lapis lazuli, surmount each month’s earthly chores.

Work on this prestigious, 416 page high point of manuscript illumination was commissioned to the famous Limbourg Brothers from the Netherlands, but came to a tragic halt when the plague struck both painters and Duke in 1416. Other artists finished some already partly prepared illuminations, probably including this precise but lively observation of autumn activity.

(text: Jos Hanou)