Pochade Boxes:
Design and Use

Traditional Pochade Boxes - The traditional 19th century pochade box is a self-contained portable artist’s studio, designed to carry all the basic necessities to paint on location and to transport the wet paintings home. It is designed to be held in the hand or on the lap, depending on its size. Traditional pochade boxes have three simple parts:

A hinged lid that works like an easel and a carrier for one or more wet paintings

A palette which slides out to one side

The lower part of the box to hold paints and brushes, etc.

These ingenious, old-fashioned boxes were used a lot by 19th and early 20th century landscape painters, but they were pretty much extinct by the mid 1980s. Traditional pochade boxes came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Some of the little ones with thumbholes in the bottom were ‘jury rigged’ from recycled cigar boxes. In the 19th century, most pochade boxes were used for oils, but they were made for pastels and watercolors as well.

With careful planning you can have everything you need in one box. And, because they are designed to carry everything you need, they are well balanced for holding in your lap. Some modern versions are also equipped with camera tripod mounts.

Tripod Mounted Palette/Easels- A second kind of small portable easel developed over the last 20 years in America has come also to be called a pochade box, although it performs quite different functions than the traditional pochade box. This variation can be described as a light-weight folding palette/easel designed to be mounted on a camera tripod and usually has the following characteristics:

A hinged lid that serves as an easel.

A shallow palette tray that may also hold some brushes and other supplies.

A mount for a camera tripod.

Unlike traditional pochade boxes, a bag is usually carried with extra supplies plus a camera tripod. Some models can carry one or two wet paintings. Because of the way these are designed, they generally don’t balance too well for laptop use.

Both of these designs are ingenious and many plein air painters will end up like me with several pochade boxes of both types (plus a French easel or two). Although I have built and used both types, I prefer the traditional style pochade box because, being a guerrilla painter, I can get everything I need into one small, compact package so that I can take it anywhere I want to go without a bunch of hassle.

Obviously getting everything into one box means compromise. (Who said a guerrilla’s life was easy?) One compromise is to come to grips with the idea of using a traditional style pochade box for one size of painting - the one that fits in the lid. There are lots of ways of getting around this limitation, but if the point is to paint more paintings in more places, why fight it? It’s pretty hard to argue with the convenience of being able to open the lid of your pochade box and start painting, and when you’re done, close the lid and take off.

Making Your Own - If you decide to make your own pochade box, think about making it out of plywood. Plywood is a pain in the neck to work with, but when you accidentally roll your plywood box down the mountain - it might look like heck when it gets to the bottom, but it won’t be a pile of matchsticks like one made from fancy hardwood.

The best design for a pochade box is a simple one. Stick to the basics. The more complicated you make a pochade box; the more things will go wrong.

Set-Up and Travel - How I set up my pochade box depends on where I’m going and how long I’ll be gone.

For short outings and day trips, I’ll content myself with a couple of panels in the lid, a few brushes, a palette cup, a small brush washer and a rag. I’ll squeeze my paints out on the palette before hand so I won’t have to pack any tubes.
For longer trips up to a week I’ll still squeeze out all the paint I think I’ll need, but I’ll take a small tube of white with me. I’ll also pack a few extras for contingencies and take along a wet painting carrier.

For real painting trips of more than a week, I have an old ski bag that I’ve tricked out with some pieces of foam lining. It holds my pochade box, a wet painting carrier and has an extra pouch for my paint tubes and other sundries. If I’m flying, I’ll check this bag, but on the return trip I’ll carry on my wet painting carrier just to make sure…

I never fly with mineral spirits or turpentine - I buy those when I get where I’m going. I stick a label on my bag identifying it as containing artist materials that are not hazardous. In addition, I have a similar note on my pochade box indicating that the artist’s colors within are of vegetable origin and not hazardous (avoid using the word “paint”). Since I have adopted these precautions, I have never had any problems on dozens of trips nationally and internationally.