Claire Le Thomas

Guillaume Apollinaire

Georges Braque

Alex Danchev

The Tricks of the Trade: Georges Braque's Artisanal Origins

Keywords:

Georges Braque's artisanal origins proved formative for Cubism. In the Cubists' use of stenciled letters, paint mixed with sand, and imitation wood and marble surfaces, contemporary chroniclers immediately detected the tricks of the trade that Braque had learned from his family's business in peinture en bâtiment (house painting) and peinture décorative (decorative painting).

As the poet Apollinaire opined, "we should not look down on things which appear new, or are grubby, or utilitarian, such as the simulated wood or marbling used by housepainters." 2 The critic André Salmon likewise described the benefit Braque derived from "the beauties of the artisan's work" and similarly vaunted the common tradesman's know-how with materials as a means to invigorate high art. 3 Indeed, the artist's varied skills contributed many of the breakthroughs essential to the history of the Cubist movement, enabling him and Picasso in 1911-12 to move beyond the hermetic phase of Analytic Cubism and initiate a new kind of two-dimensional representation that culminated in their papiers collés. Yet, while the importance of Braque's early experience is widely recognized, his apprenticeship and the technical training he received have never been described in detail.

). Work was plentiful in that rapidly growing city, and within a few years of founding a new house painting and decorating business, Charles became very prosperous. Braque & Company's renown was such that, reputedly, it was responsible for painting "almost all the interior walls erected in Le Havre at the end of the last century." 5 As was customary in families of craftsmen, Charles expected that Georges would, in due course, take over the business and increase its reputation. 6 Hence, the young Braque was apprenticed first with his father and then, also in Le Havre, with two of his father's former employees, Rupalay and Rosney, "whose speciality was deceiving the eye in every way known to man." 7 He completed his training as a peintre décorateur (decorative painter or painterdecorator) in Paris with Laberthe, another graduate of Braque & Company. According to his

polishing, and waxing, if need be. Wages were low, and remuneration was based on the time spent on the job. 14 Higher in rank was the peintre décorateur (also called a peintre en décor), who took over the painting process after the surface had been fully prepared. According to the trade manual published by Riffault and Vernaud in 1843: "No limit is placed on this kind of painting.

Everything is within its domain: the imitation of various woods, marbles, and bronze, the depiction of letters and architectural elements, tinted ornaments, fruit, flowers and birds. The diversity of these decorations, executed by a different class of artists, requires varying degrees of expertise on the part of those concerned." 15 This métier was more valued in terms of wages and social status because of its kinship with painting of the highest order. 16 Its practitioners had training in drawing, perspective, and aspects of pictorial illusionism, and over the course of the nineteenth century their status appears to have risen. In the edition of the Riffault and Vernaud manual published in 1850, the authors explained that, since the creation of the Académie, "the business of house painting is . . . a profession entirely distinct from and outside the liberal arts properly speaking and no longer has anything in common with the category of artist." 17 In the 1896 edition, however, they modified that judgment: "Nevertheless, the professional studies and skills deployed by certain painters, especially those belonging to the decorative branch of the profession, mean that they can often be ranked with true artists." 18 The importance accorded to decoration and especially the developing field of the applied arts during the second half of the century explains this crucial change of attitude. 19 Two types of peintre en bâtiment can thus be distinguished: ouvriers peintres and peintres décorateurs. In fact, the former were often called peintres en bâtiment to distinguish them from the latter, who were considered the "artists" of the building trade. The category peintre décorateur, in turn, encompassed several specialisms with their own hierarchy according to the training and skills involved, and Braque was initiated into all of them. The practitioner of filage, or striping, applied lines or "stripes" of paint, in precise widths and shades, to imitate the highlights and shadows of relief moldings, panels, cornices, and masonry joints (plates TK and fig.TK). [START_REF]Striping" is the term used for filage in Finkelstein[END_REF] The work of the fileur-said to "move in the direction of decoration" 21 -was rated less highly than that of the painter of signboards, who was "ranked . . . within the class of painters conventionally called Artists." 22 Indeed, the peintre d'enseignes not only excelled in lettering, emblems, and the interlaced initials of monograms (chiffres) associated with businesses (figs.

TK), but also enlivened shopfronts and signboards. Thus, in addition to being familiar with common styles of lettering and typefaces, and sometimes inventing new typographies (fig. TK), he had to "follow . . . the principles of painting par excellence" when depicting flowers, trees, and food items. 23 Finally, his designs had to be in harmony with the rest of the establishment's decor (figs. TK).

The work of both the fileur and the peintre d'enseignes, however, was perceived as inferior to that of the peintre décorateur proper, whose domain was mimesis and the rendering of trompe l'oeil imitations of wood, marble, and architectural features (Plates TK and fig TK). 24 The peintre décorateur came closest to the fine artist in training and guiding precepts, hence his prestige within the profession: "Perfect imitation is acquired only through serious study and very regular practice, leading to the creation of the special category of decorative painters that includes a few true artists." 25 This "serious study" entailed routine exercises of copying from plaster casts, reproductions, the live model, and real wood, marble, and other materials, as well as the mastery of drawing and perspective-the skills taught in the beaux-arts academies. [START_REF] Bonnet | The authors of professional treatises recommended putting together a library of samples for firsthand study and practice. For example, the Van der Kelen school, founded in Brussels in 1892, had a collection of samples of marble and wood[END_REF] The preeminence of peintres décorateurs was dependent above all on their ability to compose entire decors for domestic interiors, theaters, cafés, or shops and thus create unique and original works of art (figs TK). "As the decorator, he no longer has a master," opined one authority. "Once the plan is provided, he takes over; his work is no longer rejected; he is not subject to the imagination of another; his taste, his taste alone leads and inspires him. . . . It is the lessons of taste and of the great masters that must be learned." 27 Hence, the peintre décorateur possessed knowledge of the history of art so that he could re-create different period styles and avoid anachronisms, while also observing the rules of good taste (figs. TK). [START_REF]of art complemented the instructions. However, the near absence of books of models or histories of art in the inventories is striking. Academic knowledge and artistic references needed to imitate particular historical styles may[END_REF] In addition to technical know-how, he needed "a good eye, a sense of one's art, which is not taught in any book and which only the true artist's genius reveals to him." [START_REF] Riffault | [END_REF] Though not wealthy, accomplished peintres décorateurs often rose above their more humble economic origins: estate inventories document reproductions of works of art (plaster casts, engravings, and easel paintings), pianos, and libraries-signs that they had adopted the values of the grande bourgeoisie (upper middle class) and had circulated among the educated elite [START_REF]As deduced from the inventories; Archives Nationales, MC/ET/CXV/1648-Druot-Polish liquidation in 1886[END_REF] while all other housepainters (ouvriers peintres, fileurs, and peintres d'enseignes) remained of humble means and social class. Their dwellings were small, their furniture undistinguished, their decorations very limited, and their jewelry and silver rare and often pawned. Their social circle consisted of artisans or other manual workers. In other words, it was a working-class milieu or, at best, that of the petty bourgeoisie (lower middle class). [START_REF]By contrast, ownership of a good-sized painting contractor's business like that of Braque's father-one with several employees, which could therefore take on larger commissions-might lead to a substantial increase in income compared to what the ouvriers earned and the adoption of bourgeois habits[END_REF] This taxonomy of the peintre en bâtiment profession, with its distinct, hierarchically ordered trades described in ideal terms in the manuals, did not always correspond to actual practice. Distinctions between the trades were not watertight, as Philippe Hettinger observed in a manual published in 1934: "Where does the housepainter end and the decorator begin? The question is very difficult to answer; the work of the two interpenetrates so completely, intermingles so thoroughly, that it is nearly impossible to draw a line between them. As a result, the housepainter quite often needs the tools of the decorator, and vice versa." 32 Specialized peintres décorateurs existed only in the big cities. Most of the time, the person who prepared and painted the surface also did the striping, lettering, and ornamental details. In fact, the majority of commissions were for relatively simple projects, such as painting a store facade, interior, or unadorned stairwell, which an independent professional could do by himself (figs. TK). Indeed, peinture en bâtiment was, for the most part, a small operation. It was a business with one or two employees or the freelance venture of a house painter who performed all the tasks, which also included minor window glazing jobs and, increasingly in the nineteenth century, hanging wallpaper. 33 Furthermore, when it came to commissions, the margin for inventiveness-the crucible for the painter-decorator's superiority-was often narrow. The painter had to conform to the wishes of the client or to regulations that dictated the color schemes for certain businesses (undertakers, butchers, pastry chefs, and wine merchants, for example). Moreover, when building sites of considerable size were involved, the peintre en bâtiment generally worked under an architect. [START_REF]It was, in fact, common for painting contractors and painter-decorators to work for architects, who had overall authority and thus, no[END_REF]

Precepts and Foundations of the Profession

Given that peintres décorateurs usually did all the work themselves, from preparing the surface to creating the decor, they had to master the full range of trade skills-as was the case with Braque. The training sequence typically followed the hierarchical divisions, from the bottom up.

To perform the preparatory tasks the apprentice ouvrier peintre had to learn the tools and techniques of the construction trade, such as how to build scaffolding and safely use ladders.

Familiarity with the many different types of brushes was essential. One was taught to hold brushes properly, apply paint without gaps, clumps, drips, and other mishaps, and clean the tools correctly. But the cornerstone of the apprenticeship was learning to fabricate the paints and colors, a skill acquired during a long stint in a workshop. In later life, Braque stressed the defining importance to his art of the material characteristics of his paints, and he spoke with pride of not only mixing his colors himself but also grinding the raw pigments. 35 In fact, by the time he was an apprentice industry had taken over paint manufacturing, and the artisanal practice of grinding pigments was largely abandoned. Pre-ground pigments were sold as powder, flakes, and sticks, or in barrels, and only needed to be mixed with a liquid "vehicle" or medium (water, glue, turpentine, oil, or varnish). [START_REF]old skills because more finely ground pigments were easier to infuse thoroughly, resulting in more beautiful hues[END_REF] Thus, the mixture of ingredients resulted in not only the desired shade but also a paint that spread easily and would be long lasting. 37 Each paint was mixed in a camion (a fireproof pail with a handle), following a precise recipe for the required tint. To give but one example, Trellis Green consisted of one part verdigris and two parts white.

Most color formulas incorporated white for its density and brightness. By the turn of the twentieth century, zinc white gradually replaced lead white, which had caused many cases of lead poisoning, sometimes called "painter's colic." Banned in France for interior paints in 1909, lead white was one of many toxic materials used by peintres en bâtiment-one reason why it was important to the artist to know the nature of the ingredients.

Next came the thinning of the pigments to facilitate spreading with a brush. For a kilo of paint, the approximate ratio was about three parts pigment to one part medium. The novice learned the material and chemical properties of each component to avoid unexpected reactions during the mixing, application, and drying processes. For example, lead white and turpentine are siccatives (drying agents); Naples Yellow turns green in contact with steel and certain stones; and poppyseed or walnut oil were preferred for diluting lighter hues because linseed oil produces a reddish tone. Peintres en bâtiment prepared each color in small amounts as needed because the mixture easily spoils, and thus they had to be able to reproduce the exact tint for each session of painting. Given that the slightest mistake in proportions caused blisters, cracks, speckles, a wrinkled or sticky surface, or a color different from the one desired, it seems they limited themselves to a few products to simplify their task. 38 Finally, apprentices were taught the basic principles of color harmony and the most common color combinations. They learned how to avoid gaudy hues and combinations that clashed, and to privilege certain shades for particular rooms. More advanced instruction might cover the laws of simultaneous and successive contrasts, the effects of natural light on interior walls, and the weight and massing of colors critical to overall compositional balance.

The next stage in the apprenticeship of a peintre décorateur typically involved the techniques of striping (filage), lettering, and imitating marble and wood. Given the reality of the profession-that artisans rarely specialized in those respective areas-training focused on the rudiments. What eventually distinguished a fileur, peintre d'enseignes, or peintre décorateur was not so much the basic education he received but his dexterity and the overall complexity of the work he could handle. [START_REF]To other writers who interviewed him, he spoke of soil, cinders, coffee grounds, and tobacco[END_REF] The apprenticeship for striping and sign painting consisted of two parts: design and execution. Responsible for trompe l'oeil moldings, the fileur mastered the use of the ruler, compass, plumb line, and set square to calculate the proportions and outline the forms, and he had to be deft enough to ensure that his lines were straight and level. Using striping brushes of varying widths, he began with the lines that formed the shadow, then laid down the half tints and the highlights, and finished with repiqués (accentuating touches). Considerable skill was needed to achieve the illusion of bas-relief, which involved diluting the colors and blending the strokes to create subtle gradations of tone in the lines (Plates TK and TK). 40 Some expert trompe l'oeil effects demanded twenty-six or more lines.

Designing and painting a signboard required first and foremost consideration of its legibility and allure. It had to stand out from the rest of the shopfront, with text sufficiently large and prominent. One learned how to scale the text to the size of the support, which entailed marking up a grid to enlarge or stretch out the letters and to calculate the spatial intervals between them (fig. TK), as well as drawing chalk lines (cordeaux) to ensure all letters were parallel and the same height. 41 The application of color had to establish harmony between ground and figure or, conversely, exploit vivacious contrasts of hue. With his skills in tonal modeling and striping, the peintre d'enseignes created eye-catching effects of spatial projection and recession (fig. TK).

Progressing to the imitation of wood and marble surfaces, the fledgling peintre décorateur mastered the successive application of transparent glazes to re-create the complex tonal and textural effects of wood and marble by uniting the different layers of paint. Charts detailed the colors of glazes required for every type of wood and marble. Key to faux bois was reproducing the direction and pattern of the wood grain, dependent on the species and cut of the tree (plates TK). After spreading a glaze in the color of the type of wood (such as oak or mahogany), the painter rubbed it with a rag, carefully introducing the flamelike shapes of the center grain. Then he ran a steel or leather comb over the surface to mimic the straight or undulating lines of wood grain running lengthwise. To depict a knot in the wood, the painter smudged the paint with his thumb to form the node and then delineated it with a brush before going over it with the comb. All that remained was to render le maillage du bois (the vascular network of minuscule ripples). Several techniques were used to create this effect, executed with a thumbnail, the back of a fabric-covered comb, a cork, or a rubber finger cot or sheath. To complete the illusion and make the pattern look less crude, the peintre décorateur applied another glaze with a veinette or spalter (brushes made for graining and striations). A few last touches with a brush captured the pores of the wood, the shadows of any knots, and accents in the grain.

Marbling required much bolder colors, more layers of glaze, and different application techniques. One employed a chiqueteur (fat squirrel-hair brush), a spalter, and other brushes to dab, twist, and swirl the paint in imitation of marbles with different veining patterns. A second glaze, made with the same or similar colors and respecting the direction of the pattern beneath, produced the crisscross maillage, or network of veins, including the wider lines enclosing the stone fragments. As was the case with faux bois, true artistry was involved in creating a smooth and coherent maillage that did not look systematic but rather simulated the controlled randomness of nature. Finally, the painter ran a badger brush over the surface to soften the overall effect and followed with accentuating touches. He had to refrain from overdoing it and needed to work quite swiftly, without shilly-shallying, because no corrections were possible. The novice also had to learn how to combine faux materials harmoniously, when, for instance, a panel of one type of wood or marble was flanked or framed by another type (fig. XX). To complete his apprenticeship, the painter also had to be able to replicate the look of a number of other materials, such as stone, granite, and bronze. He imitated the granular texture of limestone, for example, by working over thickly applied fresh paint with a stippling brush and then sanding the surface. And he simulated the coarse grains of granite by splattering the surface with a brush dipped in several different colors, taking care to distribute the speckles evenly and to avoid blobs.

The ultimate stage of training addressed the art of drawing and the design of complete decorative schemes. Just how an apprentice was expected to acquire competence in drawing is unclear. Very few professional manuals provided instruction in the rendering of ornamental motifs, attributes, human and animal figures, or faux friezes, and it is unlikely that the master would have found the time during the workday to teach his apprentice the basics. It seems, therefore, that the novice learned to draw outside normal working hours, either by taking courses at a municipal art school or by teaching himself in his free time, perhaps with the master's assistance-given that apprentices often lodged at the master's home. 42 When it came to planning decorative ensembles, a promising peintre décorateur had to be inventive and adapt his scheme to the particular circumstances and location of the commission. It was practically impossible to use ready-made designs because, not having been intended for that space, they ran the risk of being disproportionate unless the painter reconfigured them by means of a grid. Once the overall design had been conceived, the decorative motifs were transferred onto the walls with a poncif (a pounce pattern) or stencil, which ensured uniformity and accelerated the process. 43 To make a stencil the painter cut out the required openwork pattern in heavy-duty paper, reinforcing those parts at most risk of distortion, affixed it to the surface, and then applied the colors one at a time.

Braque's Return to His Roots

I did grow up in a painting atmosphere, but it was the atmosphere of commercial house painting: cans of paint, brushes, glues, and raw pigment. I came to painting from the craft end. . . . That kind of work, the craft side of painting, has been of great value to me. Otherwise, I could never have introduced into my own paintings those decorators' tricks I've always used to create trompe l'oeil effects: false wood, false marble, and so on. In order to bring that off, there are things called graining combs, and I learned to use them. [START_REF] Braque | [END_REF] As Braque told Brassaï, his artisanal training was formative. Having learned the varied techniques of the peintre décorateur, he was able to produce signs and letters, faux marbre and faux bois, and trompe l'oeil ornaments. He earned his certificate as an artisan d'art (artistic artisan) in 1901 by making a frieze-"very 1900s" in style, as he described it-to decorate the Ceylon Tea House on rue Caumartin in Paris. 45 It is likely that Braque made stencils for that commission, a transfer method that became more widespread during the last third of the nineteenth century and was frequently used for Art Nouveau decors.

In general terms, Braque's early career corresponded to that of an ordinary peintre en bâtiment, who typically belonged to a family of artisans, entered the trade as an apprentice, and worked for a contractor, aiming to take over the family business, buy out his employer, or set up his own firm with his savings. [START_REF]This typical trajectory is reflected in the bankruptcy files[END_REF] But Braque's family was motivated by the less common ambition for social mobility. As Charles Braque's contracting business prospered and his social status advanced, expectations were likewise raised for his son. Georges Braque's upbringing was therefore more bourgeois: he attended a lycée (secondary school to prepare for the university), took music classes, enjoyed summer holidays in Harfleur, and visited Paris, where he made trips to the Louvre. Therefore, he did not follow the traditional course of a workshop apprentice, even though he grew up immersed in his father's house-painting enterprise. Rather, his training was more like that of someone intending to become an industrial draftsman or designer. [START_REF] Laurent | [END_REF] At the age of fifteen, he took his first classes in academic drawing, which included copying casts of antique sculpture and drawing from life, at the École Municipale des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre. Upon arriving in Paris to continue his apprenticeship with Laberthe, he enrolled in evening classes offered by the town hall of Batignolles to study ornamental drawing, composition, and the design of models. [START_REF]The drawing courses offered by town halls, particularly in working-class neighborhoods like Batignolles[END_REF] Most significantly, his father, an amateur painter, was an active member of Le Havre's art world, and in his youth Braque frequented the same circles and exhibited his own oil paintings alongside his father's at the local salons. [START_REF]Charles Braque exhibited regularly at the Salon de la Société des Amis des Arts in Le Havre and founded the Cercle de l'Art Moderne[END_REF] These choices attest to a desire to be more than a mere artisan and coincided with the evolution, not of the skills of the trade itself, 50 but of the way the profession of decorative painter was perceived by a new bourgeoisie eager for recognition and social prestige. 51 In the face of a glutted academic system that was losing momentum, this profession became a less risky way of embarking on a career in the arts and approaching the sought-after status of artist. [START_REF] White | For example, after training as a painter-decorator, Albert Cadell began his career "selling oil paintings, landscapes or portraits. This work was not very lucrative and, in 1884, he undertook decorative works as a subcontractor. He declared that this new type of work was more profitable[END_REF] Photographs of students in schools of decorative painting are noteworthy in this respect. For example, an 1893 photo of Alfred Van der Kelen, head of a famed decorative painting school in Brussels (still in existence today), executing an imitation marble panel surrounded by young apprentices exactly replicates the iconography of the master artist teaching in his studio (fig. The shifting class realities of Braque's family may explain some of the peculiarities of his training. Although he learned all the skills, it appears that only at the end of his apprenticeship with Laberthe in Paris was he initiated into the fabrication of paints. Since the invention of the paint tube in the middle of the nineteenth century, artistes peintres (fine artists) had used readymade colors, not mixed their own. [START_REF]It is also possible that peintres décorateurs who consumed little pigment abandoned the preparation of colors and adopted these industrial products. Some inventories mention palettes garnies (palettes preloaded with paint, from light to dark colors); for example[END_REF] Perhaps because his starting point was that of a would-be fine artist, Braque pursued his artisanal training in reverse, from the trompe l'oeil illusionism practiced by the peintre décorateur back to the fundamentals, the most basic task of the ouvrier peintre: making the colors.

Critically, Braque's apprenticeship in peinture en bâtiment served his process of unlearning or de-skilling when it came to breaking free from the rigors and habits of fine-art painting. In fact, Braque always expressed contempt for the academic courses he had pursued, whereas he seems to have taken great pleasure in his artisanal training, remaining immensely proud of it for the rest of his life. [START_REF]Braque was not very diligent or attentive and seems to have learned little or nothing at evening classes, or at the art school in Le Havre, or at the Académie Humbert. He enrolled in Léon Bonnat's class at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1905 but left in disgust after only[END_REF] During his brief enrollment at the Académie Humbert in Paris, his familiarity with the brush impressed his fellow student Georges Lepape, whom Braque surprised greatly by explaining that his background was in decorative, rather than fine-art, painting: "You have to know what you are doing, you know. There's marble of every colour and the veins, all the little veins with their different patterns; the same for wood. . . . It's very hard but you learn. . . . It's great!" [START_REF] Lepape | quoted in Lepape and Defert[END_REF] Braque's exploitation of his craft skills, both during the Cubist period and later in his career, is evidence of his attachment to that training and its enduring influence. He relished housepainter's recipes and in later life spoke of the satisfaction he took in grinding his own colors. 56 Time and again, Braque repurposed lettering and stenciling techniques and exercised his command of graining and marbling. In his 1912 painting Mozart Kubelick (Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection), for example, he referred to the trick of lettering au cordeau by leaving the parallel guidelines for the letters KUBELICK pointedly visible (fig. TK). Thanks to him, wallpaper, a material regularly used by interior decorators, became a mainstay of Cubist papiers collés (plates TK). And he taught Picasso these various processes. [START_REF]drips or dribbles, which is rarely the case with Braque[END_REF] However, it is worth noting that although Braque's practice of adding sand to his paint to create a granular, stonelike surface-imitated by both Picasso and Gris-has been ascribed to his artisanal training, the practice is not, in fact, mentioned in any of the professional manuals. [START_REF]The only reference I found related to a sandy base for gilding[END_REF] Arguably, the housepainter's very mode of thinking affected the Cubist treatment of space by 1912. The peintre décorateur worked on a flat surface and did not seek to break through it: the Renaissance principle of one-point perspective in painting-which Leon Battista Alberti likened to looking through an open window into receding space-did not apply. [START_REF]The exceptions are trompe l'oeil decorations intended to make viewers believe there is an opening to the outdoors. 60 On the flatness of Cubist space[END_REF] On the contrary, his trompe l'oeil effects created an impression of projecting relief. The so-called flatness of Cubism and its inverted perspective (projection toward the picture plane, rather than recession from it) transposed to easel painting ways of representing reality that were common in decorative painting. Likewise, the fusion of figure and ground achieved by Braque during the Cézannian and Analytic phases of Cubism corresponded to the peintre décorateur's approach to representation, which involved superimposing and blending layers on the painted surface to the point where distinctions between them effectively disappeared. Using highly diluted paint, glazes, and badger brushes, he strove to erase the transitions between the successive layers. In Braque's hands the Cubist system of faceting succeeded in unifying the different planes in the painting in a rather similar manner. 60 In the interwar decades, Braque continued to extrapolate his foundational training. His canvases from that period include many areas with striping, a great deal of imitation marble, wood, and stone textures, and multiple repeated flat motifs characteristic of wall decorations. Pride, skills, and a mode of thinking: for Braque, the 12 Housepainters were affiliated with the national construction federation and the labor unions.

See Peintre en bâtiment 1910-11; Rainhorn 2010. A third branch can be added: that of the industrial arts, because creators of models and patterns and authors of manuals were for the most part members of industrial institutions and federations. 13 Broadly speaking, the term ouvrier referred to all manual workers; the factory proletariat did not become a reality in France until the interwar period. See Noiriel 1986. 14 As the price lists show. In order to avoid discounted prices for work or, on the contrary, overcharging, the big cities hired architects draw up price lists and set rates. They were based on disbursements for labor and supplies (69 percent), profits and advances of working capital (11 percent), incidental expenses (license, store management, heating, etc.; 20 percent). The Paris price lists were often used as the standard for the provinces, taking into account the lower cost of labor. 16 Riffault and Vergnaud 1843, p. 196. 16 The price lists sometimes included the time spent to complete a determinate surface area (generally one square meter). The remuneration for decorative work was relatively high in proportion to the time spent on it. TK); invent fanciful letters, attributes, or original decorative motifs; and reproduce more than twenty kinds of marble and wood. But the Cubists never sought the virtuosity of the experienced artisan, and their imitations of wood and marble, like their lettering, are usually notably lacking in finesse. 40 "It is very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to give an exact rule for the composition and preparation of the tints, half tints, accents, and highlights that the painter must employ for striping. These tints, in fact, may vary ad infinitum because of the nature, color, and value of the ground on which the painter will have to work." Glaise and Berthelon 1875, p. 2. Furthermore, in order to produce an illusion of relief, the fileur was warned not to place the lines too close to one another, as that would result in too even an effect. Rather, he was advised to emphasize tonal differences, since tonal uniformity would flatten the motif. 41 A cordeau, or chalk line, is a string held between two fixed points that is used to draw straight lines. The string is coated with powdered chalk, held taut, and then snapped, thus depositing a faint line of chalk on the surface. 42 The lack of training in draftsmanship for apprentices in the applied arts may explain the development of municipal drawing classes during the nineteenth century and eventually the foundation of specialized schools. See Laurent 1999. 43 A poncif is a sheet of paper on which a drawing is perforated with multiple tiny holes. When a bag containing pounce powder is passed over the lines, the drawing is transferred to a surface as a series of dots. A pounce pattern can be reused several times, which explains the pejorative sense of the word poncif: a cliché, a commonplace expression, or a work obviously copied from a model and without originality. The precut stencils and pounce patterns sold in stores or reproduced in pattern books seem to have been intended only for amateurs or professionals of low skill.

  TK). Similarly, in a promotional photo of the class of 1911-12 at the École Sieber in Melun all of the students wear the white smock, floppy tie, and beret of the fine artist-an outfit very different from the contemporary housepainter's white overalls and flat cap (figs. TK, TK).

  housepainter's craft was truly what Apollinaire called "the most vigorous material expression of painting." 1 Guillaume Apollinaire, "Georges Braque," in Apollinaire 1913/2004, p. 42. Braque," in Brassaï 1982, pp. 16-25; Danchev 2005, pp. 18-21. 10 This essay is based on some twenty published primary sources-manuals for peinture en bâtiment and peinture décorative, albums and plates of models and patterns, and trade periodicals and journals-dating from the late eighteenth century to the interwar period. I researched an extended time frame beyond the dates of Braque's apprenticeship (around the turn of the twentieth century) to account for changes in practices or tastes that likely oriented his training. I also examined commercial and legal archives: about ten posthumous inventories, a few bylaws of companies in the Archives Nationales, [CLT: Archives Nationales, Paris?] and about twenty bankruptcy files in the Archives de Paris dating across the entire nineteenth century in order to ascertain what tools and materials were most frequently used and to establish the social status of the artisans concerned. 11 Riffault 1825, p. 1.