| The binding shown above is found in the 1997 Librairie SOURGET - CATALOGUE N° XVI MANUSCRITS et LIVRES Précieux, lot No. 68. I have included here the lot description. This is an amazing find for our collection of early Douceur bindings, on a previous page we were looking at another Douceur binding with these same armes of Marie-Sophie Colbert (Après la mort de Nicolas Desmaretz, l'hôtel de la rue Saint-Marc fut vendu à Charles-François de Montmorency-Luxembourg (1702-1764), qui épousa, le 9 janvier 1724, Marie-Sophie Colbert (1711-1747), marquise de Seignelay, comtesse de Tancarville et Dame de Gournay-en-Bray, nièce de Charles-Léonor Colbert.) |
| We discovered (see this page) that Marie-Sophie Colbert was a famous bibliophile and now we might suppose that Douceur was one of her favorite binders. The question is when was this binding executed, if it was in 1731 as supposed by the Sourget experts, this is one of the earliest. However the tools we see here are also found on my 1749 Henault so we must be cautious with such speculation, although we know that Douceur recieved his papers as a binder in 1721 (est reçu maître le 14 octobre 1721). We questioned whether the other binding shown in Comparative Diagram 1, could have been made in 1740. |
| Unfortunately this Colbert binding from the amazingly well done Librairie Sourget catalogue, is so large that it would not fit on the page well, the photo is necessarily reduced in size so that the fine detail is missing when you enlarge it, still we can see that many of the imprints are the same as found on the 1749 Henault shown in Comparative Diagram 2. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we see that the 1745 BnF binding RES P-YF-243 is also very similar and at a guess I would say these bindings are all from this general time of 1745, the outer roulette is however not the same, it is larger in the Colbert binding and this may signal that it is even earlier than the 1740 binding in Comparative Diagram 1. |
| In Comparative Diagram 4 we can see how Douceur has used the same tools in the same way to make this central decoration, both of these bindings were executed for Marie-Sophie Colbert, hopefully we will find yet another that will help us date these bindings more exactly. |
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click here to return to the INDEX of the 1749 Henault pages. click here to see the INDEX of the 2017 pages. click here to return to the HOME page. see below links to previous work |
| 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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