| This faint sketch by a professional, if average artist, comes from an English Model Book with 24 leaves, all covered in drawings, some ink, some pencil, some with ink wash shading, from a secular or monastic, although most likely secular, workshop with designs suitable for reproduction in manuscripts, embroidery, or wall-painting and covering most of the fifteenth century. It is the work of a number of hands. The sketch featuring Bernard is from the second half of the fifteenth century. The right of p. 18b features the Virgin underneath a canopy, crowned and nimbed, with flowing hair, with the Child on her left arm. He turns to the right, looking at a bunch of flowers in his hands. The Virgin is pressing her breast with her right hand, looking to the left where there is a nimbed abbot with crozier (Bernard), his hands clasped in prayer. Many of the subjects are those widely associated with Books of Hours, including this Lactation scene, and is therefore more likely to come from a secular workshop. There are strong continental elements in some of the drawings, and these may have been the work either of a foreign artist or an English artist who had worked in probably Paris and absorbed the French International Style. Although some of the drawings, including the Lactation picture, are of mediocre quality, the manuscript is of considerable importance. It is unique of its kind, the only surviving English example and one of only very few from northern Europe as opposed to Italy where they are more numerous. It shows the way in which the most familiar of all late medieval Bernardine iconographic scenes would have found its way into any one of a number of media.
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