Hand-painted devotional prayer card, French or Belgian, ca. 1820, depicting a circular wreath of roses, tulips and wild flowers enclosing a French text from Ephesians 5: "Femme soiez soumise à votre mary comme au Seigneur, parce que le mary est le chef de la feme come Iesus Christ est chef de l'Eglise" (Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Jesus Christ is the head of the Church). Hand-drawn and hand-colored in ink, pencil, gouache and watercolor with gilt highlights, mainly on parchment. Number 9 of the group of hand-painted devotional cards from the same collection. Condition. Measurement.

Some of these early nineteenth-century devotional cards were made as canivets, so called after the small knife used to cut their intricate patterns. Cloistered nuns made them to support their convents and charities (such convent work is also known as Klosterarbeiten). Entirely hand-cut and painted, they were the precursors of the machine-made lace-paper holy cards of later generations.

Original French: "Femme soiez soumise à votre mary comme au Seigneur, parce que le mary est le chef de la feme come Iesus Christ est chef de l'Eglise." Ephes. C. 5