| The briefcase shown above is found in a Gazette Drouot online auction catalogue (click here to see it). Gazette Drouot do not give us a lot of in formation on this item and their reproduction is very poor however we are desperate, and we can see here some important details, the barely discernable imprints tell us that this portefeuille was certainly decorated by Delorme and he included Barber's bulbous vase tool BV 1. |
| I show in Comparative Diagram 1, some of the more obvious tools that we can identify even in this low resolution reproduction, we notice some of the tools that Delorme was employing in the 70's so I an guessing that this portefeuille is roughly c.1770. Below I show a much earlier Dubuisson portefeuille that appears to have been decorated with the same BV 1, bulbous vase tool. |
| The portefeuille shown above is found in the online auction catelogue of Osenat.com (click here to see it). Personally I do not think this is early 19th century as suggested in the Osenat information. I think this portefeuille could have decorated in the Dubuisson workshops as early as 1735. When I first saw this item the dentelle reminded me of the Dubuisson dentelles found on the Almanach Royals from at least 1735 up to 1744. |
| In Comparative Diagram 2, we see a segment from the 1735 Dubuisson roulette compared with the limited detail from the portefeuille. Unfortunately the Osenat reproduction does not allow us to make a clear decision on this matter however I suspect that this is the same roulette. Within the details of the roulette we see small crowns and I suspect that this roulette was reserved for royal customers. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, we see, just barely, that the ornament found on the top of the Balthasar portefeuille flap is the same as that on the Osenat portefeuille in the same position, this tends to confirm my suspicions that the Balthasar dentelle was not made in 1768 but probably sometime in the 40's. |
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