The Emerson-White Hours (MS Typ 443-443.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University) is a book of hours and missal produced in Valenciennes, Bruges, and Ghent in the late 1470s or early 1480s. There are seven full-page miniatures (many more have been removed), fourteen historiated borders, 28 historiated initials, and 24 calendar illustrations in tempera and gold. Text pages have shell gold trompe-l'oeil borders. The illuminators include Simon Marmion, the Master of the Houghton Miniatures (named for this manuscript), the Master of the Dresden Prayerbook, and one of the Ghent Associates. The goal of analysis was to determine if identification of palettes supported previous stylistic attributions. Focusing on the illuminations attributed to Simon Marmion and the Houghton Master, we demonstrate that technical analysis can support attribution by identifying differences in artists' pigment preferences, pigment blending, and technique of paint application, particularly how the artists render shadows.

Paper is one of the most common supports for printed, painted, written, and drawn images. It is composed of fibers and other ingredients intertwined into a compact web, usually in the form of a thin sheet. Making paper involves combining fibers and fillers into a pulp slurry, depositing the suspension on a screen or roll, draining the water, and drying the pulp. Since the invention of paper about 2,000 years ago, the basic papermaking processes have gone unchanged, though hand papermaking has given way to a series of mechanical operations capable of manufacturing a continuous sheet of paper at phenomenal speeds. The selection of the fiber material and the method of treating the pulp during manufacture influence the qualities of the formed sheet of paper.

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Paper materials and works of art on paper such as drawings, watercolors, prints, books, and manuscripts represent a large portion of museum, archive, and library collections. However, paper materials are infrequently the subject of technical studies due to inherent limitations in their analysis such as the fragility of the paper substrate, a lack of suitable sampling opportunities, and the presence of mixed, but chemically similar cellulosic materials. The application of principal component analysis (PCA) modeling to specular reflection FTIR data has the potential to provide a non-invasive means of analysis for major and minor components in paper materials. Using known study collection objects, PCA models distinguishing paper sizing materials and fiber types based on specular reflection FTIR data were successfully demonstrated thus providing a plausible alternative method for the identification of paper materials in collection objects without the need for destructive testing or sampling of the object.