MORE THAN A COMMENTARY ON THE ACTUAL FIREPLACE, WHAT I AM GOING TO TELL YOU IS A STORY MADE UP OF PEOPLE BEFORE THINGS... OF ANCIENT PEOPLE, ARTISTS NOW GONE BUT WHO FOR A FEW MOMENTS WILL RETURN TO LIVE WITH US.... AND PEOPLE ENTIRELY LIVING AND ANIMATED BY A PASSION THAT IS TIMELESS.... ALL OF THESE FIGURES CONTRIBUTED TO THE FACT THAT A WORK OF ART SUCH AS THE FIREPLACE I AM PRESENTING TO YOU COULD BE BORN AND COME DOWN TO US....
FIRST CHARACTER, THE COLLECTOR.
I found this fireplace at a collector in the Lyon area with whom I have been collaborating for perhaps twenty years (how time passes, eh Sebastien... You were a kid, the first time we worked together, and you were driving around construction sites with an old car behind which was, tied up, a.... cariolino!!! You didn't have the money for a real van, but your passion for antiques gave you the strength to keep going, any way you could.
This time you hit the jackpot, and I'm not just referring to the financial part (which is only fair that there is..), but especially to the blow to the heart you must have felt when, in the half-light of that Burgundian cellar, you found those carved pieces of stone... And to think that the new owner of the mansion, a too-quickly enriched villain, did not even know what they were.... You, on the other hand, figured it out right away that it was an “Oil de Boeuf” fireplace, in the manner of the architect Majorelle, an artist who was the creator of that model of fireplace, a fireplace designed, perhaps, by the villa's architect himself, whose name we now also know and, through the great possibilities of the web, also the beautiful story...
Bravo, Sebastien, and Thank You, Sebastien, for proposing to me, before others, this very important fireplace.
SECOND CHARACTER, THE DESIGNER OF THE TIME, THE ARCHITECT.
His name was Emile, the architect Pelisse whose name is in the inscription carved in the right plinth of the fireplace (see image above right) along with the year of manufacture, 1908.. And it was precisely in the year 1908 that this professional was developing the design (later realized over the next two years) of an important (more than 300) group of houses and apartments in Clermont Ferrand (Auvergne region, bordering Burgundy) on behalf of Michel Michelin, the son of André, the founder of the tire factory of the same name.. These dwellings were intended, depending on their size and construction quality, for Michelin's executives and employees, and who knows, perhaps it was one of these executives who was the first patron of the fireplace we are examining..
I imagine him, our Emile, hunched over the drawing table and all engrossed in this enormous project that does not let him sleep at night, both because of the effort that is necessary to put into it and because of the passion that our Pelisse puts into it ... I imagine him being “disturbed” by a Michelin bigwig, who asks him. “Excuse me, architect, couldn't you, obviously paying, design me a nice fireplace of those that are so fashionable today! Majorelle type, in short.... I have a house in Burgundy, a nice villa in the country, and a nice stone fireplace would be just right for it--maybe with a nice female face.... Look, I have right here with me, coincidentally, a daguerreotype of my wife...”
Emile had no time, but that official was one of the important ones, better to accommodate him....
That may have been the case, or, more simply, our architect designed, in addition to the houses of the company “Les Abitations Bon Marché Michelin”, also that villa in Burgundy from which our friend and collector Sebastien found this little treasure...
THIRD CHARACTER, THE SCULPTOR.
This time, of the sculptor and homus faber of our fireplace, we really have the signature (see photograph on the bottom right) so to speak . “autograph” although not with a pen said signature was drawn up, but rather with a hammer and a chisel.
RAOUL MABRU, 1882-1957, a native of Clermont Ferrand itself, a city that, as we mentioned above, was the headquarters of Michelin. And our Raoul, either because he was a good sculptor (he also worked on public monuments in Paris, not exactly a stone's throw from his Auvergne..), or because he was a fellow citizen of theirs, also worked for the Michelin family and in particular for the same Michel whom we found earlier grappling with the architect Pelisse's project
AN IMPORTANT POINT OF CONTACT, WHICH MAKES ME THINK HOW THIS FIREPLACE OF OURS HAD AS ITS INITIAL CLIENT SOMEONE CONNECTED TO CLERMONT FERRAND OR THE ENTURAGE OF THE MICHELIN FAMILY..
THERE ARE TWO OTHER CHARACTERS, IN THIS STORY, THAT IT WOULD BE FAIR TO TALK ABOUT, AND THEY ARE YOU AND ME, RESPECTIVELY IN OUR CAPACITY AS SELLER AND BUYER OF THE FIREPLACE IN QUESTION, BUT ABOUT US, MAYBE, WE'LL TALK VERBALLY AND NOT IN WRITING, ALRIGHT?
