| The image shown above is an enlargement of the MS 1546 doublure corner, I want to show you here some tools that I have not seen before or at least have not catalogued up till now. Looking at the perfection of this tooling and the beauty of the gold tooled imprints themselves, we can say this decorative binding was truly fit for a King. One has to realize that when you are making something like this you cannot make a mistake, any mistake is immediately obvious you have only one chance to get it right, it takes steady hands, cool nerves, and a total confidence in one's self. The artist who made this binding was setting a high bench mark for Dubisson's school of elaborate 18th century dentelles. This is a dentelle in the style of Dubuisson some 35 years or more after Dubuisson was making them famous. No doubt he would have admired this work as much as we do now centuries later. |
| In Comparative Diagram 1, I show an imprint from the MS 1546 doublure that resembles very closely Dubuisson's imprint pd-31. I had not seen it before and will have to shuffle around a bit the old catalogue where I have already a mm-31, here however is the obvious right one. Now that we know the MM binder is J B Gosselin I am wondering how I am going to recatalogue all the imprints as perhaps gos-31 instead of mm-31. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, I show the MS 1546 doublure next to an early Dubuisson binding with a large dentelle. These two bindings are not the same size I only show them here as the same size for comparative purposes. Many of the imprints found on Dubuisson's binding are some of the earliest I have seen and I date this binding tentatively as being made sometime around 1747- 49, a full decade ahead of Derome le jeune who had a set of tools made that copied Dubuisson's tools so closely that even today few people including world famous experts are able to distinguish between them. Derome then imitated Dubuisson designs and arrangements. However the most confusing part of this period, mid 18th century, is that the Dubuisson's, Pierre-Paul and his father Reny worked for Padeloup, they decorated bindings that we now find with Padeloup's etiquette pasted inside . Thus the Dubuisson binding shown above was attributed to Padeloup in the early part of the 20th century. Most of Dubuison's early work is still attributed to Padeloup. However it is a simple matter to prove that the tools seen on this binding are the same tools Dubuisson used for a full decade to follow. |
| As we also now know that Gosselin was linked to the family Derome by marriage, we cannot overlook the possibility that Gosselin may have even worked for Derome. In Comparative Diagram 3, we compare Gosselin's work to that of Derome, these two bindings could even be contemporaneous. Certainly some imprints are nearly identical as well as the general dentelle arrangement that was first mastered by Dubuisson almost four decades earlier. |
| Looking at this detail from Gosselin's 1785 binding for Louis XVI, there is no doubt in my mind that this is some of the finest gold tooling that was ever produced in the 18th century, yet his name is barely known. |
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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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