Boubangui

Designs by Poiret and Lanvin

From “Gazette du Bon Ton”, published by
Lucien Vogel and his artists all of whom were trained at the Ecole des Beaux
Arts. The pochoir technique was originally employed for colouring woodblock
prints in the C15th. It involved applying layers of colour gouache paint (with
as many as thirty stages) to create the one design. Styles were influenced by
art movements such as Cubism, Fauvism and the Russian Ballet. Rare.

The pochoir technique was used mainly in
France from the 1880’s to 1930’s, it incorporates the use of numerous stencils
for applying individual colours using watercolour or gouache to the one sheet.
A craftsman known as a découpeur would cut stencils with a straight-edged
knife. The stencils were made of aluminium, copper, or zinc and plastic.
Stencils created by the découpeur would be passed on to the coloristes. The
coloristes applied the pigments using a variety of different brushes and
methods of paint application to create the finished pochoir print. The pochoir
technique was labour intensive, expensive and slow. As a result, techniques
such as lithography and serigraphy, mechanised in nature, replaced pochoir as a
method colour printing.