A 2024 Guide To The Best Pochade Boxes For Plein Air Painting

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When you paint outside a lot, choosing the right equipment is important, as you will need to get organized for moving around with all your painting gear, as well as dealing with outdoor weather conditions such as wind and rain. This is where you might want to consider a Pochade box.

Why purchase a Pochade Box?

Pochade boxes are used to make painting outdoors more convenient and to organize your equipment into a compact box for traveling. There are dozens of these on the market and the choice is confusing. This guide will help guide you step-by-step through all the aspects you need to consider when choosing your pochade box. There is an alternative to a pochade box, called a plein air easel. Since the concept of a plein air easel is different, I have written a separate article on it.

Unlike most sites, we are independent of any manufacturer and also do not accept any affiliate links. We do this in order to make sure this is an unbiased source of information that you can rely on to make your choice.

Pochade box reviews

To learn about specific brands see: all Pochade Box Reviews.

If you own one of these pochade boxes yourself, review it here and tell us what you like and don’t like.

There is a sister article on plein air easels. These serve the same function as a pochade box, but use a slightly different approach, that has certain advantages. See: Guide To Plein Air Easels.

Important:
The reviews on this website are independent of any manufacturer. Also this site does not contain any affiliate links, unlike many sites you find on the internet. This means you get completely unbiased advice here. Beware that most other articles have links the author gets a commission on a sale if you click on the link. We do not do this in order to keep our information unbiased.

Why I wrote this guide

Over the years I have probably bought about 20 pochade boxes and easels. Most of these I no longer use.

I wrote this guide to help my students and other artists find the best pochade box to match their needs when plein air painting. I also wrote a companion 2024 Buyers Guide to The Best Plein Air Easels for Plein Air Painters

This guide was structured to help you think about the key questions to ask before buying a pochade box, and to help you avoid making some of the same mistakes I made when buying boxes. Two key questions covered (and shown in charts at the bottom of this report) are total system weight, and palette size.

Hopefully this guide will save you both money, and studio space!

To make the weight and palette size charts comparable, I wrote the comparison charts using a standard size. I chose a pochade box and easel that would support at least a 11×14 size panel and palette. Where the manufacturer did not provide this size, I used the nearest size.

If you are looking at pochade boxes, you might also want to check out plein air easels. See our companion guide: A Guide to Plein Air Easels.

About Pochade Boxes

Generally, pochades (or color sketches) are small and easy to carry. Robert Henri and James Wilson Morrice, for example, painted pochades on small wood panels that fitted in a coat pocket, together with tubes of oil paint. Tube paint was a major innovation for artists. They were developed in 1841 and later used by artists to carry their oil paint. Others artists, such as the famous English landscape painter John Constable, painted pochades that were the same size as the final painting.

A Pochade Box is a compact box that is designed for painters who paint pochades outdoors or ‘plein air’. The box has a hinged lid that not only serves as a lid to the box, but also supports your painting. Inside the box is stored the palette. The term ‘Pochade’ is derived from the nineteenth century French verb Poche, which is a type of sketch used in painting. Most modern pochade boxes are designed to be fitted onto a camera tripod as a support.

Here are some additional features of pochade boxes

Storage space

Traditionally pochade boxes include an internal space for you to keep all of your painting supplies such as brushes, paints, and thinners. However for reasons I explain in my Guide To Pochade Boxes, this is not necessarily a good idea. There are other ways to protect your wet paintings that are much lighter than a wooden box.

Camera mount

Most modern pochade boxes have a special camera mounting screw thread. This is so that you can place them on top of a tripod for ease of painting. The one below, I have had for years. It can take up to three 14 x 10 inch painting boards, which slide into slots in the lid section. When you choose a tripod it is important to make sure that it is fairly sturdy and that the pochade box does not wobble on top of it.

Types of pochade boxes

There are many types of pochade box, from small ones that you hold in your hand, to larger ones that you need to mount on a camera tripod or support on a table.

Construction

Typically pochade boxes are made out of wood. But some vendors are now starting to make them out of modern materials such as tough plastics and aluminum.

What are your choices for pochade boxes or painting easels?

If you want to paint outside, or ‘plein air’, you need the maximum usability but with the minimum weight. Today there are a lot of choices for plein air painters, so choosing the right equipment is very difficult. It is usually only after you have been using your equipment for several months that you start to discover the problems. In my quest for the ‘perfect’ system over the course of twenty years of plein air painting, I have bought about 20 different easel systems. And spent several thousands of dollars in the process. Most of these easels and pochade boxes are now taking up space on the shelves in my studio. So this is what I have learnt……

Below are included all the major pochade boxes that you can buy on the market. Use this list together with the list of plein air easels in the companion Guide to Plein Air Easels in order to make your choice.

You can also make your own small, lightweight pochade box.

17 Pochade Boxes

How do I decide which is the best pochade box or plein air easel for me? – 7 key questions to ask

The factors

There are eight factors you need to consider when choosing a pochade box or easel system.

1. Your height (short/tall): To be able to draw accurately, you need to have your canvas or painting panel at about eye level. If it is too low you will have problems with your drawing. This is particularly critical if you are painting any subject in which perspective is important. Some easel systems will not work for tall people because the maximum height to which you can raise the panel is too low. I ran into this problem with a few systems I bought.
2. Your Strength: (strong/weak) If you are strong and used to carrying weights, then you can trade off a little weight for other features. In the table at the bottom of this article I have estimated the weight of all the components you need to make each a fully working system. That includes any additional palettes, tripods, or essential trays.
3. Palette size (large/small): If you want to become truly expert in mixing beautiful color harmonies, a large palette is essential. You will feel very constrained if the palette is too small. If the palette has side trays that is awkward to use. A major metric for evaluating a pochade box is the ratio of weight to paint mixing area.
4. Arm comfort (high/low): With some (if not all) pochade boxes you need to have the palette quite high, almost as high as your painting panel. If you paint standing up (which is the recommended way of painting plein air if you are able), this can make your arm quite tired after a while. Or you end up putting your painting below eye height which I do not recommend because it causes drawing problems. Other systems allow for a long distance between the palette and your canvas of painting panel. This allows for a more natural painting position in which your arm is lower. This is one of the reasons why I prefer a separate palette and painting support. See my article on plein air easels for more information.
5. Canvas size (large/small): Some people like to paint very large outdoors. If this is the case you need to choose an easel system that will accommodate large canvases.
6. Robustness (robust/breakable): The strength of an easel system relates to both price and weight. The lighter the system, the more likely it is to break. The better made easels and pochade boxes are sometimes more expensive. If you are traveling to remote places you need to consider what happens if your system breaks? Can you fix the box using simple and widely available materials?
7. Wind (fair weather/foul weather): When you are painting in a location with a very strong wind, if you have not chosen wisely, you won’t be able to paint and could lose a great painting opportunity. Some of these systems have a center of gravity to one side and can easily blow over.

What you don’t need

There are two features that vendors promote that in fact are not important, and should be ignored:

Storage area for paint tubes

Storage area for your panels

Five problems

1. They usually only accommodate one or two panel sizes at the most. This reduces your flexibility for the panel size you can paint.
2. They sometimes only take 1/8″ panels, and many home made panels are thicker than this.
3. The gaps between the slots may be too narrow. This is a problem if you paint with thick impasto paint.
4. Thin slots can be also be a problem on panels that have warped, or on loose linen that buckles in the heat: the paint surfaces will touch each other and your painting will be ruined.
5. There are much lighter systems for carrying wet panels (see my books on Materials and Equipment)

Pochade watch outs

There are a few design problems with some pochade boxes you need to look out for:

Gap between palette and lid

Bar obstructing palette

Panel support obstructing view of painting

Which is the best pochade box or plein air easel?

Decision table for choosing a pochade box or plein air easel

Here is a table to help you make your decision. This summarizes all of different factors to consider when choosing your pochade box or plein air easel.

I also added which pochade boxes and plein air easels I am currently using for my own work.

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Palette area to system weight efficiency

One of the key factors when choosing your plein air painting easel or pochade box is the amount of paint mixing area you get compare to the amount of weight you have to carry. Since this is the key factor I’ve made this chart for you.

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This is how I calculated the weight of each pochade setup. It is not simple to calculate this because the vendors only tell you the weight of their main system.

Weight comparison table for pochade boxes & plein air easels

You often need a lot of accessories to make the box work for you, and all this weight adds up. This information is not so obvious on manufacturer’s websites. For this reason I have included what I think are the essential accessories to this weight table. This means you get a more accurate picture of what you are going to have to carry. These are the weights I used in the palette area/weight efficiency table above.

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Super lightweight homemade pochade boxes

You can also make a homemade pochade box from easily available materials for next to nothing. And with the advantage that they weigh next to nothing. See: homemade pochade boxes.

Where can I buy a pochade box?

Here are some stores where you can buy some of the pochade boxes listed on this site. Also check out the sites for each of the manufacturers as many small companies only sell direct.

• Amazon
• Cheap Joes
• Dick Blick
• Guerilla Painter
• Jerry’s Artarama
• Jackson’s Art Supplies
• Judson’s Art Outfitters
• Mabef

Please Share!

If you liked this Guide on pochade boxes, please share it.

Also, do not forget to check out the Guide to Plein Air Easels, Pochade Box Reviews and Plein Air Easel Reviews.

Thank You

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you find it useful. If you would like to get free painting tips by email, please sign up for my free tips newsletter.

If you are interested in a structured approach for learning how to paint, take a look at my online painting classes.

Happy painting!

Barry John Raybould
Virtual Art Academy

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