GILT LEATHER WALLPAPER WALLET-BINDING
[WALLPAPER BINDING.]
‘Chassereau des Biens et Rentes deves a joseph Paul Roegier et marie margu te [sic] Bourdeau son espouse, faisant en par le tier des Biens delaissés par le trepasse d[e] sr joseph P[…] Roegiers son pere le 30e […] 1749 et de la demolle marie magdalaine erbach sa mere aussi trepassée le 7e avril 1[7]45 Requiescant in Pace …’
Hainaut, 1750–1773.
Manuscript on paper, folio, ff. [69], of which 24 blank, manuscript slips (one part-printed) loosely inserted; in French, neatly written in brown ink in two hands, up to 32 lines per page; first leaf chipped at outer margin, minor duststaining to first leaves, a little dampstaining throughout; sewn on 4 cords and laced into a large fragment (c. 260 x 457 mm) of green-ground gilt-tooled leather wallpaper with outlines in black pigment, wallet-flap to fore-edge, guards and pastedowns of eighteenth-century manuscript waste on vellum, rear pastedown lined with manuscript waste on paper (see below); a little worn with some superficial cracking, rear pastedown lifted, but overall very well-preserved; housed in a green cloth box.
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‘Chassereau des Biens et Rentes deves a joseph Paul Roegier et marie margu te [sic] Bourdeau son espouse, faisant en par le tier des Biens delaissés par le trepasse d[e] sr joseph P[…] Roegiers son pere le 30e […] 1749 et de la demolle marie magdalaine erbach sa mere aussi trepassée le 7e avril 1[7]45 Requiescant in Pace …’
A manuscript account book compiled by Joseph Paul Roegier and his son, recording receipts over a quarter-century, in an attractive and unusual binding reusing a large fragment of gilt leather wallpaper.
The accounts record receipts from 1750 to 1773 for extensive landholdings to the south of Ath in the province of Hainaut, between Mons and Tournai in Wallonia. The villages include Villers-Saint-Amand, Irchonwelz, Ladeuze, Tongre-Notre-Dame and Tongre-Saint-Martin, Chievres, Mévergnies-lez-Lens, and Cambron-Saint-Vincent.
Gilt leather wallpaper, known variously as Ledertapete or Goldtapete, Goudleer, ‘cordwain’, or ‘wrought leather’, was first developed in North Africa and introduced to Europe through Moorish Spain. Although often associated with the Netherlands, where it was produced from the early sixteenth century and became a major industry in the seventeenth, the present example is more likely from Venice, where individual tools were used to decorate the leather rather than or in addition to large wooden blocks.
The interspersal of blanks within the manuscript, allowing for the addition of further entries at a later date, suggests that Roegier was using a bound blankbook when he began his accounts in 1750, which, combined with the appearance of a calendar to April 1748 on the manuscript waste at the rear of the volume, allows the binding to be dated uncommonly precisely to between 1748 and 1750.
Leather wallpaper bindings are exceptionally rare, and we have not encountered any others of this size.
See Waterer, Spanish Leather (1971).
