Unpaginated (24 pages). The book is illustrated by 11 tipped in color gravure plates. Each plate faces the page containing its brief description, which is in fact, the verso of the preceding plate.

"Jean Fouquet is situated between the brothers Limbourg, who worked at the beginning of the fifteenth century for Jean Duc de Berri, and Jean Colombe, who, at the end of the same century, completed the greatest of the illuminated manuscripts the Limbourgs had started, Les Tres Riches Heures of this noble lord. This period marks the apogee of the art of the miniature in France, the attainment of an unsurpassed degree of perfection.

Between Flemish art, which spread to Burgundy, and the art of Italy, Jean Fouquet, who was assuredly acquainted with the work of the Limbourgs and who probably traveled to Italy, has left, like a good Tourangeau, the imprint of his French genius on this refined, delicate and at time powerful art, and has enriched it with some of its purest masterpieces."

The two page Introduction by Henri Malo, (Curator of the Condé Museum), recounts the horrifying story of the loss and destruction of this beautiful Hours in 1630, the subsequent locating of the individual pages--often one at a time--followed by its painstaking reconstruction.

etienne chevalier's book hours