Lot 14•
ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT - KATE EADIE. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, illuminated manuscript on vellum
11 March 2020, 13:00 GMT
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £8,812.50 inc. premium
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ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT - KATE EADIE
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, illuminated manuscript on vellum, 20 pages, frontispiece with a full-page miniature of woodcutters felling trees with an elaborate border of hawthorn foliage and berries in gold, brown and blue, title-page with raised gold lettering, second frontispiece incorporating large round miniature of the Church at Stoke Poges and smaller one of the Gray memorial, within a border of oak leaves and branches with acorns, subtitle-page lettered in blue and turquoise, the poem mostly written in black ink on 16 pages (including the Epitaph), each with a different decorative border in gold and colours of foliage reflecting the text of the poem, capital letters in various colours on a gold ground throughout, the first page with elaborate heading and historiated letter T incorporating figure of the ploughman, the following 14 pages each with one historiated and one decorative initial, original limp vellum, titled in gilt on upper cover, remnants of green silk ties, preserved in green cloth solander box, 4to (317 x 240mm.), [c.1900-1910]
Footnotes
A fine and very rare example of an illuminated manuscript by the Birmingham enameller, jeweller, illuminator and Arts & Crafts designer Kate Eadie.
Kate Muriel Mason Eadie (1880-1945) trained at the Birmingham school of Art, where she is believed to have been taught by Arthur Joseph Gaskin. In 1902 she won the national Owen Jones prize, awarded to 'Students at the Schools of Art who, in annual competition, produce the best designs for Household Furniture, Carpets, Wall-papers and Hangings, Damask, Chintzes etc.' In 1915, she became the first woman to be elected Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, exhibiting jewellery, metalware, stained glass design, illuminated manuscripts and Limoges enamels - her gouache on vellum The Defence of Guenevere won the Harry Lucas Award for the finest example of decorative artwork in the RBSA's Spring Exhibition of 1916. At Birmingham she had also met the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sidney Harold Meteyard. She posed as a model in many of his most famous paintings, and having worked together for twenty years, they eventually married in 1940.
Provenance: Kate Eadie; thence by descent to her great nephew in Cookshill nr. Alcester (where Kate Eadie and Sydney Metyard lived), from whom it was acquired.