Plein air painting has one real enemy, and it is not the weather. It is the amount of gear between deciding to go and actually starting. If the setup takes twenty minutes, the light has moved before you have mixed a colour, and after a few trips the gear stays in the cupboard.

A pochade box removes that step. The Mabef M105 opens into a complete painting station. Panel in the lid, sliding palette across the body, paint and brushes in the compartments underneath. Open it on your knees and you are working, or screw it onto a camera tripod and stand.

It is built the way the rest of Mabef's range is built, in solid steam treated Italian beech with brass plated hardware, which is why these boxes tend to outlast the painters' first few of everything else.

Perfect for

What you get

How it works in the field

Open the lid and it becomes the easel. A panel drops into the 6mm slots and stays put at the angle the lid sets. There are two supports, so a finished wet panel goes into the second slot and travels home without touching anything.

Slide the palette out and it becomes the mixing surface. Twenty four by thirty centimetres is a real palette, not a token one, and the five brush holes along the edge mean the loaded brush you are not using has a home.

Everything else lives underneath. Three compartments under the palette take the tubes, the brushes, the knife and the rag. When you are done, the palette slides back over the top and the lid closes on the whole kit.

Sitting down or standing up

On your knees is the traditional way, and it is why a pochade box is the size it is. Sitting on a stool, a rock or the boot of the car, with the box open across your lap, is the fastest setup in painting.

The 1/4 inch thread underneath is for the rest of the time. It is the same thread as every camera, so a photographic tripod you already own will take it, and suddenly you are standing, at whatever height you like, on ground that would never have worked for sitting.

Why steam treated beech

Mabef build in solid beech, steam treated before it is worked, then oiled and stain resistant, with brass plated rust proof hardware. On a studio easel that stability keeps the frame square. On a box that gets carried in a hot car, opened in the sun and closed damp, it is what keeps the lid meeting the body and the palette sliding freely for years rather than seasons.

The oiled finish is the practical half. Paint sits on the surface rather than soaking in, so a wipe at the end of the day keeps the box looking like a box.

Specifications

For full details of the Mabef warranty, including how to register your easel, see the Mabef warranty page.

Mabef, and why we carry so much of it

Mabef have been making easels in Italy since 1948 and have never once diversified into anything else. No brushes, no paint, no pencil cases. Just easels, for three quarters of a century, by a family who clearly think about hinges more than is strictly healthy. We find that faintly wonderful, and it shows in the joinery and in the warranty they are willing to put behind it.

Art Shed carries over forty Mabef lines, one of the deepest Mabef ranges in Australia: field easels, studio masts with cranks, lyre easels, sketch boxes, table easels, sculpture trestles, print racks, stools and the full run of beech palettes. Not a token three models and a special order form. If you are building a studio around Mabef, or matching an easel you already own, we almost certainly have the rest of the family in stock.

Getting the most out of your M105

Set it up once at home before the first trip. Load the compartments, mount it on the tripod, open it and look at it. Working out what is missing in the kitchen beats working it out on a headland with the light going.

Keep a dedicated small kit in it. The box works best when it is packed and ready rather than raided for studio brushes every week. A dozen tubes and four brushes that live in the box will get you out of the house more often than a perfect kit you have to assemble.

Mind the wind. On a tripod, an open pochade box is a sail. Hang your bag from the centre column, spread the legs wider than feels necessary, and point the open lid into the wind rather than across it.

Scrape the palette before it cures. A knife and a rag at the end of the session, while the paint is still moving, keeps the slide running properly. Oiled beech is forgiving, dried oil paint in a runner is not.

Then go and paint something you can see, rather than a photograph of it. That is the whole idea.

Questions about the Mabef M105 Pochade Box