The August painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Ambrosius Benson's Young Woman Reading a Book of Hours. Benson was a Dutch (Netherlandish) artist, working around 1495 - 1550. I love the calm, the serenity, the concentration of the image, and the restraint of the palette and the composition. This is one of my favourite periods of painting, and I could look at images of this sort all day long. There is no need to speculate what she might be reading, as the title tells us - a book of hours was a devotional aide, including liturgical calendars, prayers for the different times of day, lists of saints, Gospel texts etc, and they were often lavishly illustrated in their own right.
Below is the kind of thing she is reading, the Dutch Bout Psalter-Hours from around the same period.
August being August, I was rather expecting an outdoor, colourful and sunny scene in the countryside. The painting is fine, but it would rather suit to a more wintery month according to me, as it suggests a reading during those long winter nights.
The picture of the book of hours that you chose also features a reading woman by the way. Books of hours are always so colourful and well-illustrated. And this reminds me that I forgot to tell you that I went to an exhibition about the drawings of William Blake a few weeks ago. I guess it was the same exhibition that took place in Edinburgh last winter. And there, I got to see the original poem Tyger, Tyger that I read previously on this blog. I was surprised because it was a tiny and delicate thing; the hand-written text of the whole poem and the related pictures surrounding the poem took less than 2 inches (widthwise) by 3 inches (lenghtwise). The tag was reading that said tyger is supposed to be an allegory of the blood of the people that were killed during the French Revolution.
Posted by: glo | Monday, 03 August 2009 at 02:31 AM