![]() ![]() Portable easelsįrench easels are still in wide use and have many adherents, and they are better suited for some things, such as handling large scale paintings and stretched canvasses (as opposed to panels). Modern pochade boxes are fitted with tripod mounts which allow them to be set up in an extremely flexible fashion, and carried to the painting site more easily than the traditional outdoor painting box/easel combination known as a French easel. ![]() It’s derived from a 19th Century French verb, pocher, meaning to sketch.Ī pochade box, then, is a portable painting box with a built in easel, meant to facilitate the creation of small alla prima paintings or sketches.Ī pochade box shouldn’t be confused with a simple painting box, which holds painting supplies and a wooden palette, but has no provision for acting as an easel. I think it’s one of those French words that’s actually used more commonly among non French speakers. Pochade is a French word meaning a small painted sketch, particularly one painted in oils, out of doors, and often in preparation for a larger, more finished work. As in the 19th Century, there is new equipment that makes the practice easier and more practical, notably a new generation of pochade boxes. Plein air painting has undergone something of a renaissance in the last 20 years or so, a phenomenon which seems to be growing. The practice was subsequently made even more popular by the French Impressionists, and by painters influenced by them in America and elsewhere. Though the practice by individuals can be traced back further, painting en plein air, meaning in the plain air or simply painting out of doors, was first practiced in significant numbers by artists in the Forest of Fontainbleau in the mid 19th Century.Īround that time, the advent of soft metal tubes for carrying paint and the development of the “box easel”, or “French easel” as it is more commonly known today (image at left), made it much more practical to carry painting equipment into the field. ![]()
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