A pochade box on the wrong support is a frustrating morning. Too small a head and the box overhangs and tips. Too flimsy a leg set and every brushstroke moves the painting. Meanwhile the whole point of a pochade box is that you walked somewhere good to use it, so whatever is holding it up has to have come along quietly in the first place.

The Mabef MA30 is a proper wooden tripod built for exactly this job. An 18 by 18cm flat platform, so a pochade box sits on it fully supported rather than perched. Height from 70cm to 116cm, so you can work sitting or standing. All of it in oiled Italian beech, weighing 1.3kg and holding up to 8kg.

Mabef make it for their M104 and M105 pochade boxes. What they do not shout about is that those boxes mount on a standard photographic tripod thread, so this tripod is far less proprietary than it looks.

Perfect for

What makes it worth owning

Wood, outdoors, on purpose

Aluminium tripods are lighter and cheaper and there is nothing wrong with one. Beech has two advantages that matter specifically for painting. It damps vibration instead of transmitting it, so a breeze or a heavy hand does not travel up into the painting. And it is comfortable to handle in real weather, where an aluminium leg is freezing at dawn and unpleasantly hot by two in the afternoon.

The oiled, stain resistant finish is the practical part. Paint gets on everything outdoors, and on oiled beech it wipes off rather than soaking in.

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.

Questions about the Mabef MA30 Tripod