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The tiny Paris pastel shop that changed art history

La Maison du Pastel supplied materials to Degas, Vuillard and Winston Churchill

Imogen Savage YESTERDAY

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Behind an old wooden counter in a shop in Paris’s Le Marais district, a woman in a

light-blue shirt stretches for a shelf behind her and slides out a box. She places it on
the counter and unstacks three hidden layers. Inside are neat rows of colourful sticks,
cushioned in cotton wool and held in tonal formation. Although firm, they appear
sweet and doughy. Each is individually wrapped in a loop of branded paper that reads
“Henri Roché”.

The sticks are handmade pastels, fine enough for Édouard Vuillard, Edgar Degas,
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Odilon Redon, Richard Serra, Winston Churchill —
all customers of the oldest pastel maker in the world, La Maison du Pastel.

The shop dates back to the 18th century. Through the French Revolution and two
world wars, it has produced pastels in shrinking and ballooning quantities for some of
the most well-known and innovative artists of the past 250 years. In the 1990s, the
shop nearly closed for good. Today, it is co-owned by Isabelle Roché, a distant cousin
of founder Henri Roché, and Margaret Zayer, Isabelle’s partner, an American lured to
Paris in 2010 after reading about the Maison in an article written by a pastellist, an
artist who works in the medium. Together they have kept alive a traditional craft that,
for a time, seemed destined to die out.
Isabelle Roché © Marguerite Bornhauser
© Marguerite Bornhauser

A pastel is a stick of pure colour without almost any liquid vehicle, just a bit of binder
to keep it together and some chalk or clay to change the tone. Pastels contain up to 90
per cent pigment, 40 per cent more than most oil paints. They are powdery and
smooth, matt and vivid. The physical properties of pastels, the way in which the
powder sits loosely on the surface of the paper, make pastel artworks both luminous
and fragile. “The precious powder falls off as easily as scales from a butterfly’s wings,”
wrote the French philosopher and critic Denis Diderot in 1765.

One of the appeals of using pastels was — and is — their immediacy. Colour is
transferred from hand to paper. No pre-mixing, no drying time. Degas’ highly
colouristic compositions of dancers in motion were produced from life. With pastels,
he could rapidly sketch the dancers’ tutus, which shone in blues, whites and yellows,
up-lit on stage by a blazing glow. Unlike paints, pastels cannot be mixed together on a
palette or on the surface of the artwork. Too much blending creates muddied,
compacted colours, therefore artists need to buy each individual colour they want to
use. In the studios of pastellists, there are always rows and rows of coloured sticks.

The Maison du Pastel shop, off rue Rambuteau, opens only on Thursday afternoons.
In this small window of time, Isabelle and Margaret serve their customers like they
are selling elixirs for the soul. They spend the rest of the week at their atelier in a
village 60km outside Paris, where they live in a dilapidated house previously owned
by Isabelle’s ancestors. There they make 1,800 shades by hand, using a method passed
down from Henri Roché Sr, which has changed little since the 18th century. Each
pastel begins life plucked from a vivid lump of pigment dough, which is beaten with a
mallet inside a piece of cloth to remove excess water. It is then weighed and rolled, cut
and stamped, dried and numbered. The only mechanised part of the process is the
grinding of the pigments, which is now done by a machine bought in the 1940s by
Isabelle’s cousins that spatters the wall behind it with every colour running through
its teeth.
© Marguerite Bornhauser

When Isabelle took over in 2000, the Maison was facing collapse. Her cousin Denise,
an elderly woman in her eighties, worked there alone, producing a few colours for a
handful of dedicated artists. The atelier had been rundown since the second world war
and had no heating. Denise was looking for a successor, and Isabelle, leaving behind a
successful career as an engineer, was the only person who wanted the job. Denise
warned her she’d never make a living. But Isabelle needed a radical change.

“[Since childhood] everything was paved for

me and I followed it,” she explains. “I was
The story of the Maison good at maths and physics, and I studied
is a cacophony of engineering, like my father. Then I was on
echoes, of history this route in the petrochemical industry for
layering and circling high-flyers. I had everything I could want
materially, and a good social life, but I was
not happy. Something hit me on a trip to
Tanzania. It was the wildlife. I love nature. Suddenly, I saw myself from a distance.
When I got back, I started crying every morning. I wasn’t sleeping. When I started
going to psychotherapy, I realised that this is my life but this is not who I am. And
there was this Maison, with 300 years of history, making this beautiful product, on the
verge of dying, and at the time I was fighting for my own life, in a way. I didn’t know
that at the time, but over the years I realised that, as I was rebuilding La Maison du
Pastel, I was rebuilding myself. It was the first real conscious choice I had ever made.”

Forging her own path, working largely alone and pumping her money into the
business, Isabelle increased the number of shades to 300 in two years. As pastellists
work with individual colours, the more colours the Maison could offer, the better it
served its customers. It was difficult to do; each pigment is unique and requires a
specific formula. In seven years, she produced 567 shades.
© Marguerite Bornhauser
Margaret Zayer © Marguerite Bornhauser

And then came Margaret. In 2010, the shop was still in a dilapidated state. “We had
no real lighting, no floor, no heating. The nitrile gloves we wear to protect ourselves
from the chemicals were not warm enough,” says Margaret. Herself a pastellist and
self-proclaimed art materials geek, she had written Isabelle a letter while she was a
student at a liberal arts college in Vermont, so enamoured was she with the work
Isabelle was doing. Isabelle invited her to stay for the summer. When the summer was
over she returned to Vermont, but after graduating from college she returned to the
Maison, and to Isabelle, and they’ve been running the shop together ever since. “I
need to be using my hands,” says Margaret. She too saw something in the Maison that
made her feel she belonged. “The Maison saved both of us, in a sense. Our
relationship is the most foundational element of the company. We’ve been together
for 12 years.”

The story of the Maison is a cacophony of echoes, of history layering and circling.
Isabelle and Margaret are in the process of organising the archives. It is no ordinary
family junk. This is cultural heritage: jars of old pigments, documents that time has
turned into artefacts, recipes, pamphlets, boxes of old ads. “Look at this ad for
‘Mastico moustache dye’,” says Margaret, pulling out a stack of printed sheets and
handing me one. On it a swooning lady in period costume is sitting on the lap of a
handsome man, fondling his elaborate moustache. “[The Maison] used to sell
cosmetics too.”

The past feels unnervingly present. Successive owners have left scribbles on the walls
and doors. On the wall of the atelier there is a list of pigments written in pencil
beneath the name “Vuillard”: it is a customer order.

Édouard Vuillard was a French post-Impressionist artist interested in pastels for their
purity of colour. He captured the indoor life of Parisians using a patchwork of pattern
and colour into which figures camouflaged or emerged. “The more mystical the
painter, the more vivid the colours,” he wrote in his private journal in August 1890.
There are other customer orders dotted around.
Pastels had a frenzied heyday in the 18th century then fell out of vogue, along
with anything to do with the Rococo style, after the French Revolution. At that time
the Maison had a succession of owners, based first in the Ile de la Cité by Notre-Dame,
a site where traders, importers and art academies jostled for space, and then at
different locations in Le Marais. It wasn’t until towards the end of the 19th century
that the pastel medium came into its own. “In the 18th century, artists loved the
velvety nature of pastel, when it was used predominantly in portrait painting,” says
Leila Sauvage, conservation scientist at the Rijksmuseum and a pastel specialist.
“What you see at the end of the 19th century is artists really experimenting, playing
with technique, texture and surface. [The famous pastellist] Odilon Redon was
exploring with matt and shiny effects.”

By the time Henri Roché Sr took over the Macle House of Pastels (as La Maison du
Pastel was known) in 1879, artists were hungry for the possibilities offered by the
medium. They were no longer trying to replicate the effects of oil painting but were
exploring pastel’s own graphic qualities. It was a direct, portable, versatile medium.
“Henri Roché was part of this revival,” says Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, curator of
graphic arts at the Musée d’Orsay. “There is evidence [in the Maison archive] of letters
from Degas, Vuillard and Whistler that show that [the Maison was] really
collaborating with artists to give them what they wanted. And they extended the range
of colours available to artists. This is one of the reasons the Maison was so successful.”
Henri Roché Sr, a trained chemist, had the knowhow to modify recipes to produce the
best pastels; he died in 1925 but passed on his knowledge to his son, also named
Henri Roché.
© Marguerite Bornhauser

In 1946, after the second world war, the Rochés returned from the south of France to
find their premises destroyed and set about rebuilding them from scratch. They were
still in touch with their artists. Paul Maze, the post-Impressionist, was a dedicated
customer. Winston Churchill, Maze’s friend, regularly stole his Roché pastels, so
Henri Roché’s daughter Gisèle dropped off a box of them at Churchill’s office during a
trip to the UK. The thank-you note that the Rochés received from Churchill’s secretary
was included in a recent exhibition at Blenheim Palace documenting Maze and
Churchill’s friendship. Before Henri Roché’s death in 1948, he left his business to his
wife, Reneé, and their three daughters.

The Maison’s symbiotic relationship with its artist clients continued under Reneé and
then Huberte, the eldest daughter. “Huberte was a fucking saint,” says Margaret. “The
three sisters had no children; they lived with a lot of hardship. They did it all for their
artists.” The business was kept afloat by a small number of artists who often bought
more pastels than they needed. One in particular stood out: Sam Szafran.

Inside the shop, the city sounds faint beyond the archway. The room smells of
pastels and the old wood of the furniture. “Prussian Blue smells sweet,” says Isabelle,
“some reds too, earth pigments smell musty, other pigments relatively odourless.”
Each stick of colour is a little piece of the world ground down and formed into
something new: California Poppy, Reddish Grey, Storm Green, Seraphin Blue,
Crepuscular Violet, Velvet Black, Galaxy Black, Extra Black.

Isabelle looks at the framed posters displayed on the wall, some from the 1960s,
others more recent. There is something robust yet calm, even melancholy, about her
presence. Her blue-grey eyes focus on the poster for the Sam Szafran exhibition
currently on at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. It is the first show of the artist’s
work — paintings of exaggeratedly warped rooms and staircases, people overgrown by
leaves and vines — since his death three years ago. It includes a vitrine containing
rows of his Roché pastels. Szafran was one of the few major contemporary artists who
worked almost exclusively with pastels
worked almost exclusively with pastels.

“The exhibition opening was emotional for us,” says Isabelle. “There are only a few
people that would die for the pastels. He was one.” Szafran had a deep connection to
the shop and to Isabelle’s cousins. “He bought enough to last him a few lifetimes,” she
says. “He saw something in them that he recognised: it was a common sense of
suffering. They had such a hard life.” Szafran, who was Jewish, survived the Nazi
occupation of France as a small boy. As a young artist, he lived in poverty but became
obsessed with pastels, beginning with Sennelier sticks then graduating to Rochés. It
was like moving, Szafran said, “from a horse and cart to a Ferrari”.

“I don’t know what it is about pastels,” continues Isabelle. “I see them as these objects
with a kind of soul. Each one is different.” She turns to the drawers next to her. “My
cousin Huberte would open the drawers and say, ‘there are people in there.’”
© Marguerite Bornhauser
© Marguerite Bornhauser

Footsteps tap cleanly across the courtyard and echo up the white facades. A handsome
older gentleman appears, greeting Isabelle and Margaret with hugs. He is introduced
as Jean-Luc Bouquet. I ask him if he’s an artist, and he turns to me with a smile.
“Yes,” he replies, “a pastellist”. He opens a small box he bought from Huberte years
ago. Inside is a dark pastel, a blackish-greenish grey. He wants another. It is not clear
if they still make the same one. Margaret tries to find an alternative, laying out the
boxes. Each pastel offered is dark but with a different hue, some more green, some
more grey. She fills a square of paper with different coloured strokes, testing them
out. Jean-Luc looks reticent and decides against them. It is not just about the colour,
it’s the handling, the texture, the saturation. He is protective over his old stick.

Isabelle is serving an American tourist with

purple hair. “Hey,” says Margaret, walking
I don’t know what it is over to them. She is small and strong and has
about pastels. I see them the face of a woman from a Renoir painting,
as these objects with a her mouth always on the verge of a witty
kind of soul remark and sharp observant eyes. “Can I take
a photo? I’m collecting images of customers
Isabelle Roché, co-owner of La Maison du
Pastel who match our pastels.” “Sure,” says the
tourist and bows her head next to the
“Aubergine” range, a box of purples. The
underside of her hair is a more silvery purple. As Margaret pulls out her phone, the
tourist speaks from her upside-down position. “You know, my hair is not technically
‘aubergine’. My colourist calls it ‘unicorn’.”

A growing number of artists on Instagram post about their use of Roché pastels,
arranging them in pleasing displays. The Maison is collaborating with some of them.
“My ancestors were always modernising, so we should too,” says Isabelle. On social
media, there is a sense that people want to possess these colours not only for drawing
or painting — they want to wear them, to pose with them. The iridescent range — the
golds, silvers and shimmering “Scarab” collection of dark, opulent boudoir tones —
and the hot pink “Flamboyants” range of six half-sticks look almost like make-up.
d f d ld d d f h k h
Margaret was amazed to find old advertising designs for a hot pink range in the
archive. She and Henri Roché had had the same idea separately. “The past, the
present, are all a jumble here,” she says.

The next day, Margaret and Isabelle are making a new pastel colour using an
earth pigment found in their archive. Lined up on a wooden board, the wet sticks look
like tiny loaves of bread ready for baking. Producing a usable pastel stick of high
quality is difficult to do. The method of making them by hand that Isabelle and
Margaret use, one honed over centuries, is sensitive to the natural propensities of
each pigment. “Something is lost when the process is mechanised — the pastels are
treated as a uniform product and the vibrancy of colour is compromised,” says
Margaret. The earth pigments suck up water; some synthetic pigments are very fine
and unpredictable; carbon black — which the Maison uses for their blackest black, the
blackest available in pastel form — is friable yet greasy and very difficult to make into
a stick. They need to balance the other elements of the pastel accordingly — the
binder, the fillers — and handle with care. The American artist Richard Serra ordered
large quantities of their blackest black for his “Ramble Drawings” series. They had to
make a lot of it very quickly.

Isabelle offers me cherries and figs from the trees outside. I can’t help thinking of
them as Margaret might, as potential pastel colours. “We can’t go for a quiet walk,”
says Isabelle. “Well, I can. I switch off when I walk, but Margaret sees colour
everywhere.” The pair sit in their newly restored atelier surrounded by old wooden
drawers filled with pastels. Through the window you can see the garden and
dilapidated house. “It’s been tough,” says Margaret. “At the end of the day, there’s
nobody saving us. We got out of the dark by doing good work”.

We watch a home video on their computer. Huberte, then in her sixties, turns to the
camera, huge eyes, laughing. Standing against the patterned wall tiles in her apron,
the scene looks like a Vuillard pastel painting. Denise comes down the steps with a
similar smile and large eyes. Each of the sisters has hair dyed a different colour.
Gisèle, the most enigmatic of the three, a poet, is elsewhere. The person behind the
camera is Alfred Straub, a German former prisoner of war sent to the Maison during
the reparations process. He helped to rebuild the atelier after the Germans looted it.
Straub liked it so much there he stayed an extra year. It’s now the 1980s. He returns to
the Maison to visit. There, the house with its veranda, fig tree, cherry tree. A
h f h d h d h l h
cacophony of echoes. Inside the drawers, there are people in there.

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