November — Gathering Acorns

A lone swineherd hurls a stick into an oak canopy to knock down acorns for the pigs rooting below him — the simplest, most sparsely populated composition in the whole calendar, a single figure in a bare autumn forest. Because the original November folio was left unfinished at Jean and Paul de Limbourg's deaths in 1416, the miniature as it survives was completed decades later by the painter Jean Colombe, working for a subsequent owner of the manuscript — making this page a rare visible seam between two campaigns of work, seventy years apart, on the same unfinished book. The zodiac lunette turns from Libra to Scorpio. Its quiet is the calendar's exhale before December's hunt.

Maker

The Limbourg Brothers (Herman, Paul & Jean de Limbourg); later folios completed by Jean Colombe

Date

c. 1412–1416

Medium of the original

Illuminated manuscript

Original held by

Musée Condé, Chantilly

Credit

Musée Condé, Chantilly · via Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Public domain, verified

Catalogue number

PA-00915