July — Shearing and Harvest at Poitiers

Sheep-shearers and reapers work beneath the Duke's own château.

Work: Book of Hours (calendar cycle)
Artist / creator: The Limbourg Brothers (Herman, Paul & Jean de Limbourg); later folios completed by Jean Colombe
Origin & date: Franco-Flemish, c. 1412–1416 (later miniatures c. 1485–1489)
Held by: Musée Condé, Chantilly

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Sized to protect print quality — this scan's resolution doesn't clear our floor for a physical print, so this piece is offered as a digital download only.

Size

$24.00

The story

Two forms of high-summer labor unfold side by side: sheep are sheared in the foreground while, across the river, reapers cut wheat with sickles — and behind both, the Château de Poitiers, one of the Duke of Berry's own principal residences, anchors the scene in his personal domain rather than a generic countryside. The heat of the month is legible in the reapers' rolled sleeves and the shorn sheep's bare pink skin. The zodiac lunette carries Cancer into Leo. Where January displayed the Duke's wealth in gold plate, July quietly displays it in land — his own castle standing sentinel over the harvest that sustained it.

About this reproduction

Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Musée Condé, Chantilly’s open-access release.
Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
Color-managed to the source scan.
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Frame

This scan's resolution is offered as a digital download only, so there's no physical size to frame here — shown for reference, true to the piece's own proportions.

From The Calendar

January — The Duke's New Year
The calendar's famous frontispiece: Jean de Berry at his own feast table.

February — The Peasants' Hearth
A snow-covered farmyard, and the coldest, tenderest scene in the calendar.

March — Plowing at Lusignan
Sowers and shepherds beneath a fairy-tale castle on the horizon.

April — The Betrothal
A ring exchanged before the Château de Dourdan, in the year's first green.