Bringing the Holy Land Home: The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece

Where did this go?

By Reuben Reyes '23




According to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the object's ownership can be traced back to Joseph Brummer and earlier on to Jean Peslier. According to French texts from the mid nineteenth century, Peslier was a professor at a college in Avallon, which is in the same region as Vézelay. Peslier may have been able to salvage this object from Vézelay and then sold it to Joseph Brummer in a 'Commerce d'art,' or 'art trade' in the early twentieth century. Joseph Brummer was a Hungarian-born art dealer and collector and was most well known for the 'Brummer Gallery,' in which he and his brothers took an interest in ancient, medieval, contemporary French, and pre-Columbian art. The 'Brummer Gallery,' which began in Paris but eventually moved to New York City, played an instrumental role in forming the collections of Henry Walters, William Randolph Hearst, the Metropolitan Museum, and more. After Joseph Brummer's death in 1947, the objects in the gallery were auctioned off in 1949, when the Spandrel with the Griffin in a Roundel was purchased by the William Hayes Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and held in their collection ever since. 
 

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