Abstract/Summary

A study of stencil-making in Paris in the eighteenth century, and of stencil makers (‘graveur en caractères’, ‘faiseur de caractères’) active there, reporting on methods of work, commercial circumstances, locations, products, customers, distribution networks and professional trajectories. The study features two stencil makers in detail, Bresson de Maillard (active 1740s–1780s) and Jean Gabriel Bery (active from 1760s, d. 1786), alongside other contemporary and later stencil makers associated with them. The study draws on primary texts describing stencil making and stencil work, technical illustrations, advertisements, specimens, receipted bills, public administrative documents and death inventories, published works, and artefacts including stencil plates and stencil work. A series of appendices list known advertisements of Bresson de Maillard, transcribe and translate representative advertisements, and transcribe and translate descriptions and valuations of stencil merchandise, tools and materials from several inventaires après décès.