|
In this description they quote Michon who claimed that 9 of the hundreds of mosaics that he studied contained the tickets of the Deromes, on five of them were found the tickets of J A Derome, what he doesn't tell you is that on dozens of others were found the tickets of Dubuisson, these he ignored and or changed the attributions to that of J A Derome. However the most obvious red flag is when Michon comes to speaking of the Almanachs Royal, everyone knew that the Dubuisson's were decorating hundreds of Almanachs with their plaques, it seems as though the Dubuisson's had cornered the business of Almanach decoration, yet in his book Michon does not even mention the Dubuissons. This is our red flag to imagine he could have written such a book without a large chapter on the contribution of the Dubuissons. Michon is an example of someone who is so convinced of his own viewpoint he is unable to consider any evidence that would weaken his own theory, and worse someone who pushes his own theory in detriment to the evidence that will prove him wrong. I must admit that it does seem rather odd that J A Derome would have put his ticket inside a binding he never decorated, however Padeloup was doing the same thing in this same period. Lets say you were a rich bibliophile living in France in the middle of the 18th century, you hear from your neighbour that J A Derome makes great bindings, so you go to his shop and order a fancy cover on a book you want. J A simply is the middle man he organizes the work, he buys all the materials and outsources the actual binding work and has the gold tooling done by Dubuisson, when all is complete he puts his ticket inside and the costomer is happy, he has a wonderful J A Derome production. J A sees that this is an easier, quick way to make money and continues to sell bindings with his ticket inside and Dubuisson's decoration on the outside. This would have worked probably when Dubuisson was just starting out in the late 40's and early 50's, and as long as J A could come up with a tempting amount of money for the work. This isn't only my theory, one of the greatest experts, on French Bookbinders and bookbindings, Ernest Thoinan (1827-1894) also had doubts about whether or not J A Derome, was actually doreur as well as a binder (there were few) and spoke of the artist who was doing the gold tooking for J A Derome, as I have already discussed on another page (click here to see this page).
|
