A standing figure of a man reads from a book; he is dressed in a tunic buttoned down the front and belted, over which is a cloak. He wears a pointed cap. The figure stands on an integral hexagonal base, with a hole in the center; it is flat at the back. The figure is broken across the neck; the beard and nose are slightly damaged.

The figure is intended to represent a mourner or pleurant (weeper), a type of figure used in France on tombs, in which series of such figures were placed into niches running around the tomb. The type is first seen in French sculpture in the first half of the thirteenth century, for example in the tomb of the brother of Saint Louis, Philippe Dagobert, who died in 1235.¹ The fashion for these figures reached the height of its popularity, and its highest expression, in the tombs made for two fifteenth-century Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold and his son John the Fearless, which survive in a restored state in Dijon. The figures for the tomb of Philip the Bold (died 1404), made by Claus Sluter and Claus de Werve, were completed by 1410.² That of John the Fearless (died 1419) and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria (died 1424), was commissioned by Philip the Good from the sculptor Juan de la Huerta in 1443, but the majority of the pleurants for it were made by Antoine Le Moiturier between 1466 and 1469.³ The other major fifteenth-century tomb to incorporate pleurants was that of John, duc de Berry, begun in the early fifteenth century by Jean de Cambrai, but completed after 1450, when King Charles VII commissioned Étienne Bobillet and Paul Mosselmann to make the remainder of the mourning figures.⁴ Designed for a specific space in tomb monuments, most fifteenth-century pleurants are around the same size, with a height of around 16 inches (40 cm). Many other tombs depended from the celebrated enterprises in Dijon; for example the contract drawn up in 1448 for the tomb of Charles I of Bourbon and his wife Agnès of Burgundy in the Chapelle Neuve of the priory church in Souvigny specifically tasked the sculptor, Jacques Morel, with taking the tomb of Philip the Bold as his model. A surviving pleurant from this tomb in the Wyvern collection, London, is indeed clearly based on one of the weepers from the Philip the Bold tomb.⁵

Most of these pleurants are monk-like figures dressed in long robes and engaged in some form of pensive mourning. The Straus figure is quite different in conception, showing the man engaged in the task of reading, presumably a prayer book, and is somewhat flatter than most pleurant figures. It was sold to Percy Straus as coming from “the church of Apt.” This may have been a reference to the tomb of Saint Elzéar de Sabran, once in the church of the Cordeliers in the town of Apt in Vaucluse, made between 1370 and 1373.⁶ However, that tomb was made very much earlier than the fifteenth-century style of the Straus figure.

The inconsistencies in the provenance and the excellent condition of the figure suggest that it may date from the nineteenth century rather than the fifteenth. It in fact fits well within the romanticized evocations of the Middle Ages characteristic of the so-called Troubadour style, immensely popular in France in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁷

—Jeremy Warren