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Padeloup and Derome part 5
As it is the custom to attribute to Padeloup all the mosaics of the period, so to Derome are credited all the bindings whereon we see the fer a l'oiseau, a gracefully cut tool wherein a tiny bird with outstretched wings gives life and vivacity to the decoration of the cover. In Derome's hands this decoration consisted generally of a dentelle, a lacework border obviously modeled on the marvelously easy and varied wrought-iron of the French smiths of the middle of the eighteenth century. Nothing could be at once lighter and firmer, and of its kind more charming, than the best of the openwork borders of Derome, solidly tooled on broad morocco. And the motives, borrowed from the artist artisans who were forging the gates and making the locks of the French connoisseurs of that century, are capable of infinite variation. Probably there are no two bindings of Derome's exactly alike.
I confess that I have here praised Derome more warmly than do the French critics at whose feet I sit, and whose learned taste I envy. Derome's work seems to me to be preferable at all points to Padeloup's; easier, more graceful, more appropriate - in a word, more decorative.
