An art bronze foundry in the Chevreuse valley that casts for the sculptors whose work fills the museums, and whose actual purpose is to put the craft into new hands. Not a family firm. A training foundation, which is rarer.
The foundry
The Fonderie de Coubertin casts art bronze at Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, south-west of Paris, by the lost-wax method. A single figure passes through dozens of hands and can take months, from the wax through the moulding and the pour to the chasing and the patina. It appears in the Musée d'Orsay's catalogue of founders, which is the short way of saying that a good deal of what you have stood in front of under gallery lights came out of this building.
What it actually is
It would be easy, and wrong, to describe it as an old family firm. The foundry sits inside the Fondation de Coubertin alongside the Ateliers Saint-Jacques, and the whole thing grew out of a 1950 association between Yvonne de Coubertin and Jean Bernard of the Compagnons du Devoir. Its stated purpose is the training of young artisans. It works in the compagnon tradition, which means the craft is transmitted rather than inherited: the point is not to keep the knowledge in a family but to hand it to whoever will carry it next.
Why that matters
A foundry that exists to train is a different proposition from a workshop that exists to survive. It explains why nothing here has been made faster in a century, because faster would show in the surface, and it explains why the names of the people who did the work are almost never on the label. The sculptor signs. The foundry does not. That gap between the credit and the making is the whole reason to know the place exists.
At a glance
The TGC view
We are asked for makers, and the ones worth knowing are rarely the ones with a shopfront. Coubertin is the example we use when a client wants to understand why a bronze costs what it costs. Visits are not on general offer and are arranged, when they are possible at all, by asking properly and in advance.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗A Munich manufactory has been making the same sixteen figures since 1760. The eighteenth century ones are museum objects and the new ones are catalogue items, and the gap between those two sentences is the whole story.
Read the review →A workshop in the old Templeton carpet factory firing vitreous enamel watch dials by hand, one of very few in the world doing grand feu and its own fumé enamel entirely in-house. The failure rate is high, the waitlist runs toward 2027, and the colour cannot be rushed.
Read the review →An indigo workshop in Tokushima that grows the plant, ferments the leaves and dyes the cloth, all three. The dye is not just natural, it is alive, and it has to be fed every morning.
Read the review →