| I found this notice (shown above) in an old Auction Catalogue, I was intrigued by the fer à l'oiseau, which seemed identical to the Dubuisson pd-4 and thought there might have been some other Dubuisson tools used here, so I started searching for more examples from this workshop, eventually I found 4 or five and even managed to buy one in poor condition , from this I was able to get good high resolution images of the imprints that were found on most of these bindings. |
| Below I show another Etat binding with the same fer à l'oiseau, and a variation of tools, one of them very similar to a tool that Jubert used quite often (jj-11), however there are many imprints that are of the same type that can be found in Jubert's bindings yet are slightly different so we need more proof (click on all images to see enlargements). |
| Below I show another Etat binding with the same fer à l'oiseau. In every case these bindings have been attributed to Derome le Jeune, however there are tools here that I suspect Derome never used, especially this left facing fer à l'oiseau, In the auction details listed for item 202 they state that there is a ticket of Derome le jeune inside and give estimations of 1782 for the date that this binding may have been made, mysteriously we do not see any obvious Derome tools in the dentelle. We can see however identical tools in the last two auction examples that are not found in my scanned example. |
| Finally I show one more Etat binding that is found in a Rahir catalogue and is such a good reproduction that we can see the imprints clearly click on the image to see an enlargement |
| Now you are probably thinking well yes they are all from the same workshop but what is so special. I am going to show on the next few pages that these post Dubuisson Etat bindings were decorated with some of Dubuisson's tools and more importantly that this workshop also produced mosaic bindings, bindings that have been attributed to Derome le Jeune or his father but in fact were made by another binder. There are no Derome imprints found on the Etat Bindings, nor are there any Jubert imprints, none from the MM binder, yet Derome has his ticket in some of these bindings... we are going to find out who this artist was and spare his work from the dizzying list of Derome attributions. |
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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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