(SAINT PAUL). ~ [Monastery work painted miniature on parchment with embroidery. South Germany, c. 1800 or before].
Embroidered panel on silk (315 × 260 mm) with paper support, incorporating a gouache painting on parchment depicting Saint Paul with sword and book. Blue and gilt cut paper border, gold and silver thread with blue and yellow silk. Slight darkening, some small areas of stitching with minor damage, very rarely with loss, the silk and paper supports slightly fragile at margins, verso with traces of paste and old blue paper backing. Old gilt frame, glazed.
An attractive and elaborate example of German devotional Klosterarbeit, typical of enclosed communities, usually (but not always) convents of nuns. The decorative border here is an exuberant baroque combination of flowers, leaves and stems enclosing the parchment painting, within a border of gold cut-paper stars on a feathery cut blue paper. Dating these pieces is not easy, since traditional styles were both conservative and enduring. The support here is laid paper with a partially visible watermark with monogram (SME or SVE?)which we have so far been unable to identify (the applied silk work partially obscuring it). A small manuscript note on an old paper reinforcement at the back bears script in what appears to be an eighteenth-century hand.
Saint Paul appears with his customary attributes of a sword, recalling his martyrdom (he was beheaded in Rome in AD 67) and book, representing his letters in the New Testament.