The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux is an illuminated book of hours in the Gothic style. It was sold in to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where it is now part of the collection held at The Cloisters accession number The book is very lavishly decorated, mostly in grisaille drawings, and is a highly important example of an early royal book of hours, a type of book designed for the personal devotions of a wealthy lay-person, which was then less than a century old.
It has been described as "the high point of Parisian court painting", showing "the unprecedentedly refined artistic tastes of the time". There are folios, with 25 full page miniatures, but many other historiated initials and images in the borders of most pages, so that over illustrations have been counted. Only ten folios have no decoration, just plain text, suggesting that the book was never entirely finished.
The miniatures use a variety of grisaille drawing in pen known or at least so called in an inventory that included this work as "de blanc et noir" and tempera for the other colours. The full-page paintings include cycles of what are always the most commonly found phases of the Life of Christ , the Passion and Infancy. These illustrate the Hours of the Virgin , which is found in some other books of hours, but most unusually they are arranged on facing pages showing a scene from the Passion on the left and from the Infancy on the right, with eight pairs of scenes.
The text is unusual in that the saints' days noted in the calendar, and those mentioned in the litany , are clearly those of Paris, featuring all the otherwise obscure local saints one would expect, such as Saint Cloud and Saint Germain.
However the rest of the text follows forms typical of hours written for members of the Dominican order. It is possible that two different models were accidentally used by the scribes, though this seems somewhat careless in a major royal commission.
