There is a particular kind of ache that comes from standing somewhere beautiful with the light doing something extraordinary, and knowing the canvas in your car is too small for it. You paint the little study. You tell yourself the little study was the plan. It was not the plan.

Most field easels quietly make that decision for you. They hold what they hold, so you take what they take. The Mabef M32 is the one that stops making it. It is the giant of the Mabef field range, and it exists for exactly this problem.

The mast extends to hold canvases up to 200cm high. The head takes 6kg of loaded, dripping canvas without complaint. And the whole thing still folds to a 103cm bundle weighing 4kg, with a leather handle, so it goes over your shoulder and out the door. That ratio is the whole trick. It carries more than it weighs, which means the size of your painting stops being a transport decision and goes back to being an artistic one.

Perfect for

What makes the M32 different

Why beech, and why it matters outdoors

Mabef build in oiled, stain-resistant beech. Beech is dense and dimensionally stable, which is the unglamorous reason these easels are still tight years later while cheaper pine ones develop a lean and a wobble. Outdoors that matters more, because the wood is going through damp mornings and hot afternoons and back again. The oiled finish is the second half of it. Paint sits on the surface instead of soaking into the grain, so a wipe with a rag keeps it looking like an easel rather than a palette.

The non-collapsible safety system is the feature nobody appreciates until the day it earns its keep. The legs lock. They do not quietly fold while you are leaning in on a two metre canvas with a loaded brush.

The head goes all the way flat

Plenty of field easels tilt a few degrees and call it adjustable. The M32 head pivots through the full range from vertical to horizontal, set by lever handles rather than fiddly wing nuts you drop in long grass. Flat matters if you paint in watercolour, if you pour, or if you are working wet into wet and would rather gravity was not part of the composition. Vertical matters for oils. One easel does both, which is the argument for buying once.

Specifications

For full details of the Mabef lifetime warranty, 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 lifetime 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 M32

Set it up once at home first. Assembly is simple but doing it for the first time in a car park in the wind is nobody's idea of fun. Learn where the lever handles are while you can see them.

Load the canvas before the final height adjustment. The ratchet is easier to set with the weight already on it, and you end up with the canvas where your eye actually wants it rather than where it seemed right when empty.

Wipe it down before it goes back in the car. Oiled beech forgives a lot, but wet paint left to cure in a joint does not do the ratchet any favours.

Store it standing or flat, not leaning. Same as any wooden easel. A long mast left propped at an angle for months is how a lean starts.

And then go and use it. Take the big canvas. Drive to the spot you keep photographing and never painting. Set up in the actual weather with the actual light and make something far too large to be sensible. That is what this easel is for, and it is a very good reason to own one.

Questions about the Mabef M32 Giant Field Easel