| I show here W.Cat.216 an early Derome dentelle, I say early, mainly due to the palette at the base of the spine, Barber has catalogued this tool as PAL 33, we might call it J.-A. Derome's homemade palette as it is so poorly formed that it seems doubtful that it could have been made by a professional toolmaker. However thank goodness that Jacques-Antoine Derome passed it on to his son Derome le jeune, who seemed to love it and decorated most of his early bindings with it. With this passage of tools we discovered at last a real J.-A. Derome binding (click here to see it). We have looked at examples of this palette on page 1, where I pointed out the regular occurrence of six rings in the decoration of the spine panels, now in this W.Cat.216 example the rings are missing, and we have to wonder was this binding made before the 6 ring fad or after? |
| Here we see another example of PAL 33 in this 1753 QUESNEL, within the decoration of the spine panels we see the famous 6 rings. Below, in Comparative Diagram 1, we see Barber's PAL 33 along with the W.Cat.216 example. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, we can see that the decoration of these bindings is similar although not identical, The treatment of the palettes is however identical with alternating solid and dashed filets. We do not know exactly when this binding was made however I suspect that it was not made in 1753 and probably made a decade later (only a guess). However remembering that W.Cat.216 was made after 1757 or 1758 and the contemporaneous nature of their decoration, these bindings must then surely fall into the early work of Derome le jeune. That is not to say that I rule out the possibility that J.-A. Derome made dentelle bindings in the late 40's and early 50's, however there seems to be a lack of any bindings that would bridge the gap from his early dentelles to these early bindings of Derome le jeune. Here we are reminded of Aristotle's famous statement, "The more you know, the more you realize that there is so much more that you don't know." |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I compare the W.Cat.216 spine with that of another early Derome le jeune binding 1524 HEURES that we have examined thoroughly on another page (click here to see it). Here we see that the treatment of the palettes is the same in all three instances, however here we find that the decoration of the spine panel corners has been made with the same tool, that may in fact be an old J.-A. Derome pair. |
| In Comparative Diagram 4, I have assembled the tools mentioned in Barber's description of W.Cat.216 compared with my own previously catalogued imprints of Derome le jeune. You will notice that my dj-12-2 imprint corresponds to Barber's DCR 3 however he has failed to include the second crowning dot. While his model DCT 44 is illustrated with an additional part that is not actually part of this tool as shown in my jad-11 model, this is actually a J.-A. Derome tool, thus the prefix "jad". |
| In Comparative Diagram 5, I show imprints that Barber has not mentioned, (but may be somewhere in his catalogue) these are high resolution copies from the HEURES however the same imprints are found on W.Cat.216. |
| In Comparative Diagram 6, I have isolated an important early Derome tool that does not appear in his later bindings, yet appears in Jubert's later bindings (click here to see 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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