Kellner & Fils was one of the leading French coachbuilders throughout the nineteenth century, and was one of the many concerns that successfully transferred their expertise into the design and construction of bodywork for luxury motor cars. Operating at the highest end of the automotive world from their offices on the Champs Elysees, they produced bodies for such noted marques as Rolls Royce, Hispano-Suiza, Duesenberg and Bugatti - indeed, one of the six famed Bugatti Royales was bodied by Kellner.
These drawings from Kellner & Fils depict two early twentieth-century automobiles with bespoke coach-built bodywork and passenger cabins. Given the bespoke nature of coachbuilding services, manufacturers typically employed draughtsmen and artists to produce visual renderings of their designs for clients. These drawings allowed clients to visualise and approve the bodywork and passenger cabins that the coachbuilder would then construct atop the chassis supplied by the manufacturer (Matthew C. Sonfield, Custom Automotive Coachbuilding in the United States, 1900-1940, 1996).
One drawing has a pencil notation on the reverse: “Rolls Royce”, and depicts a 40/50HP Silver Ghost in ‘brougham’ configuration (with exposed chauffeur compartment and enclosed passenger cabin). The Silver Ghost was Rolls Royce’s flagship model from 1906 to 1926 and is identifiable among contemporary Rolls Royces by the design of the rear suspension. The other drawing lacks any such notation, but probably depicts an early Hispano Suiza - possibly a T30 - in limousine-landaulet configuration (with full-length convertible hood and division between chauffeur and passenger cabins). The layout in this drawing is rather unusual, in that a spotlight appears to be mounted directly to the front radiator grill.
The clarity and precision of these drawings is poignant in view of the eventual fate of the Kellner family and business. Jacques Kellner took charge of the business in 1931: Kellner & Fils survived the Great Depression and continued to operate in France up to World War II. In 1942, however, Jacques Kellner was arrested and summarily executed by the occupying Nazi forces. He was charged with using these very skills of clarity and precision to provide detailed diagrams of German military installations to the French Resistance (Peter M. Larson and Ben Erickson, The Kellner Affair: Matters of Life and Death, 2018).
Coachbuilder renderings from the earliest years of the automobile are extremely rare at auction, and those from Kellner & Fils are rarer still. Equally noteworthy is the design of these examples, allowing the car to be visualised in different configurations - again, a rare feature amongst surviving examples.
