The
White Wedding, or, Hawking at the Court of Philip the Good, or, The
Marriage of Philip the Good, or Mariage du duc de Bourgogne Philippe le
Bon avec Isabelle de Portugal
by Cynthia Virtue
based on investigations by Jack Banyard/Brian James.
The
short version of this page: this painting was a copy of the original
painting; it was made after 1550, which puts it over 120 years later
than the event it depicts.
Years and years ago, I first saw this painting in Boucher's 20,000 Years of Fashion
(1965), where it is given an entire full-color page (page 211)
and describes it as "fifteenth century, around 1442." A few years
later, after becoming extremely interested in houppelandes and the
amazing hats worn with them, it was clear to me that many of the
clothing forms, tailoring, and hats in this picture are quite unlike
anything else seen in England or France around this time, but it wasn't
until some dozen years ago that I saw reference to the painting being a
copy of an earlier work.
Indeed, even in this modern age of
Google, Google Image Search, and so on, the details were hard to find.
Jack Banyard wrote to me recently, hoping to dig up some
confirmation of its history, as I had mentioned it as dubious elsewhere
on my web pages here. We threw keyword searches back and forth at
each other until he hit the jackpot, that being the description of the
painting in the database of the owning museum.
Here is his English translation of that page:
area: Painting Object type: Table Author / Player: Anonymous School: Drance Title: THE MARRIAGE OF PHILIPPE BON.JANVIER 1430 Period: 2nd half 16th century Materials / Technical: Oil painting; Canvas Dimensions: 164 H; 120 L Subject represented: Scene (Duke of Burgundy, Duchess of Burgundy, collation, crockery, servant, horse, dog, pond, swan, clothing, a hat, musician, trumpet, arms, village, hunting with bird, tree, house)
Date representation: 1430-1401 Location of conservation: Versailles; National Museum of the castle and Trianons
Musee de France Under Law No. 2002-5, January 4, 2002
Of
course, this is terribly frustrating to people who want to recreate any
of these outfits --there are so many of them, with good detail, and
some even shown from the back! This is so rare -- but they
aren't reliable. However, one could at least take an example of
one of these, and use it to hunt for more documentable images from the
original time period.
