| On this page we are going to look at two more nearly identical Derome bindings. I have copied below a Google translated text for binding 74 which appears in a 2016 binoche et giquello auction catalogue (click here to see it). I added a wikipedia text to it to give a bit more information concerning this opera by Rousseau. The experts for this auction give a date of around 1760 for the manuscript, and suggest that the binding could be from the workshops of Douceur, or Dubuisson, or Padeloup... they do not mention Derome. Padeloup died in 1758 and there is not a single Douceur or Dubuisson tool found in the decoration of this binding although the tools are virtually identical to those that Dubuisson was using a decade earlier. |
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No. 74 80,000 - 100,000 Euros ROUSSEAU (Jean-Jacques) Le Devin du village."The Village Soothsayer (French: Le devin du village) is a one-act French opera (intermde) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who also wrote the libretto. It was the first work in the repertory of the Academie Royale de Musique for which the text and music were by the same author. It was first performed on 18 October 1752 before the royal court at Fontainebleau, and for the public, on 1 March 1753 at the Theatre du Palais-Royal in Paris. King Louis XV loved the piece so much that he offered Rousseau the great honor of a life pension. Rousseau refused the honor. However, the opera became one of the most popular of its day and brought him both wealth and fame. The opera was also performed at the wedding of the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette" Folio manuscript circa 1760 (365 x 265 mm) with a title and 131 pages, red morocco, wide dentelle of large rococo styled irons, the corners embelished with musical instruments, very large central composite centrepiece, in the form of a rhombus diamond, decorated spine, inner dentelle, lining and paper guards light green with floral decoration and gold background, guilded edges. (Binding of the time). Superb and very luxurious handwritten copy, carefully penned calligraphy. Each page is decorated with garlands in gray ink, the title placed in a rococo style frame in black ink; each of the eight scenes begins with a title placed in a decorative frame occupying half of the page. The music is divided into ten staves on each page and copied in brown ink, as are the words artistically calligraphed and interposed between the staves. Six pages with only the blank staves complete the volume. Sumptuous dentelle binding, extremely spectacular, which can be attributed to one of the great workshops of the time equipped to decorate bindings of this format, Douceur, Dubuisson, or Padeloup. Beautiful volume. |
| I show above the information for binding 233, we have looked closely at this binding on another page, (click here to see it). Now with a another nearly identical binding showing up we start to look at these descriptions more closely to see if they were made for the same person at the same time, and indeed it turns out that they are both manuscripts connected to music. Both descriptions mention Martin, and as good as Google should be, I cannot find this Martin in connection with these two musical events. |
| The reproduction of this folio sized binding, item 233, is found on Plate 43 of Edouard Rahir's 1910 Catalogue, LIVRES DANS DE RICHES RELIURES. There are two things that I must point out while we are on this subject. The first is that Rahir's heliogravure reproduction of this particular binding is amazing, unmatched in its quality that allows one to enlarge the image without a loss of detail. The second point is that Derome le jeune, if he was the one who actually gold tooled this binding, has achieved a rare high point in the execution of the tooling, here we see at last, the imprints with all their fine detail. The combination of these two exceptional events allows us to catalogue these imprints at high resolution (600 dpi). |
| I made the original copy of the diagram shown above, over 10 years ago and never got around to adding the imprint catalogue numbers. These imprints of Derome le jeune match so closely the imprints of the same type by Pierre-Paul Dubuisson that even modern experts have yet to distinguish the differences among them, and therefore wind up attributing the work of Dubuisson to Derome or Padeloup for whom he did some work as a dorer. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, I show only some of the Dubuisson imprints for which Derome le jeune had copies. Derome had copies of virtually every Dubuisson tool, however what we do not know is whether it was Derome's father Jacques-Antoine Derome who had these identical tools made or whether it was Dubuisson who copied J A Derome's tools. In as much as we do not have a single binding by J A Derome that might prove his case, I suspect that it was he who copied the Dubuisson tools and later Derome le jeune who had a complete set of Dubuisson's tools and employed them in an identical fashion as I have shown on numerous pages. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I have placed a 1751 Dubuisson binding (at the same scale) on top of the 233 binding of Derome le jeune that has to have been made at least 10 years after the work of Dubuisson, perhaps as much as 20 years as we are still trying to establish a chronology for these musical bindings with a drawer handle roulette that is not what we found on the other folio sized bindings (shown below). |
| Below I show one more Comparative Diagram comparing Derome's binding with a Dubuisson binding found in the 1938 Catalogue of Edouard Rahir, Volume III. item #738. This item is listed as a 1746 publication, and the decorative tooling is unmistakably that of Dubuisson, It may be that this is some of Dubuisson's early work and it is interesting to see the effort which Derome took to copy it, some 15 or more years later. Many of Derome's tools that can be seen here are simply copies of the Dubuisson originals. (click here to see more about this) |
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| Even experts are sometimes wrong, before you spend thousands on a book, please do your own research! Just because I say a certain binding can be attributed to le Maitre isn't any kind of guarantee, don't take my word for it, go a step further and get your own proof. In these pages I have provided you with a way of doing just that. |
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