The notary initially spelt his name Coeffier, a commonly found version, but corrected this, in the inventory which was carried out nine days later. Coiffier’s 82-page inventaire (on normal notarial paper rather than its subject’s luxury product) contains a good deal of this, and is the basis for this note. As always in this type of biographical research the key document is the inventaire après décès, from which so much information about the individual, his family, his business and his contracts emerges. We can only establish this by consulting the original property agreements, for which you will search in vain in the Archives nationales if you don’t know the notary and date. In fact these were all the same building. 133 in 1796 (from the Salon livret), the labels and almanachs have no. Lemoine himself was not far away, in the rue des Bons-Enfants (and in 1810 would move even closer, to the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, just a few yards away). The adjacent property was occupied by another papetier, Giroux, of whom more below. The neighbouring shops included printsellers such as Aaron Martinet, a few doors away. Back in the eighteenth century however, before the construction of the rue de Rivoli, the buildings were closer to the Louvre, as you can see from this print by Louis-Pierre Baltard: It is now known as the rue de Marengo, a short street running north from the north entrance to the Cour Carré of the Louvre. These give a succession of different numbers in the street, which itself undergoes changes of name, from rue du Coq-Saint-Honoré to rue du Coq-Honoré and even rue du Coq. There are of course a handful of references in the trade almanachs of the period. And finally there is a reference in the memoirs of the duchesse d’Abrantès to a letter which she received from one of her friends, “très soignée dans tout ce qui l’approchait”, who had chosen to write it “sur du papier vélin satiné venant de chez Coiffier, alors le Susse de la papeterie élégante de Paris.” (Susse, for today’s readers, was the most up-market of Paris stationers at the later period when the duchesse was writing just the sort of place Gilberte Swann would have patronised much later still.) Turner (Tate, above), as well as diarists such as the English traveller Bertie Greatheed. Owners of these books include artists ranging from Jacques-Louis David (examples in the Louvre and the Fogg) to J. But no further information about Coiffier was offered.Ī wider search however produces a few examples of made-up sketchbooks that he supplied, all with a distinctive label: And when very recently Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey published an article about Lemoine’s portrait of Fragonard (Jeffares 139), she reasonably speculated that it too, although dated the following year, was probably made with these velvet crayons. He is for example still not in the Guide Labreuche.
The unprecedented recognition accorded to this artist’s supplier (“colourman” hardly seems le mot juste for a purveyor of black) suggested that he merited further examination, but his name was absent from all the reference books I consulted. The portrait of the actress and star of the Comédie-Italienne, Mme Dugazon (above, private collection Jeffares 124), was one of those mentioned in the 1796 livret.
When, twenty years ago, I was working on Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine, I came across an entry in the 1796 salon livret for which I can recall no parallel:
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