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Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier

February 06, 2023

Élisabeth Thuillier (née Aléné; 1841 – 7 July 1907) and Marie-Berthe Thuillier (1867 – 1947) were a mother-daughter team of French colourists. They ran a workshop in Paris, where their employees hand-coloured early films and photographic slides using their plans and colour choices. They are remembered especially for the work they did for the director Georges Méliès.

Letterhead used by Berthe Thuillier, with pictures of the medals she had won.

Early lives

Élisabeth Aléné was born in Guénange in 1841. She was one of seven children of a Catholic farming family. She and three older siblings moved to Paris around 1848–50, during a period of mass migrations to cities spurred on by the Revolutions of 1848 and the 1846–1860 cholera pandemic.[1] She worked variously as a cook and house servant before being hired to work for A. Binant, an art dealer and art supply merchant. Aléné gave birth to two children in 1864 and 1865; both died soon after and the father or fathers went unlisted in official records. In 1867, she had a third child, Marie-Berthe (known as Berthe), with Jules Arthur Thuillier of Forceville-en-Vimeu (1846-1875). He legally recognized the child at the time of birth, and he and Élisabeth Aléné were married in 1874. He died the following year, leaving no funds for his wife; it was probably at this time that Élisabeth Thuillier went into business for herself as a photograph colourist.[1]

In 1888, when Berthe Thuillier was about twenty-one, she married a sculpture student, Eugène Boutier. (Boutier had displayed a bust of "Mlle B.T.", likely his future wife, at the Académie des Beaux-Arts' Salon the year before.) The couple lived among the Parisian art community in Montmartre; Berthe Thuillier worked as a photographer around this time, very unusually for a woman in nineteenth-century France. She gave birth to a daughter, Georgette, in 1889. She separated from her husband in 1902, and obtained a divorce from him in 1906.[1]

Colourist work

Élisabeth Thuillier had experience in colouring slides for magic lanterns, and in other kinds of photographic and colour work.[2] Berthe Thuillier may have joined the work in 1887, when she was nineteen; she continued it as the head of the workforce after her mother's death.[1] The Thuilliers had started colouring film by 1897.[2] This cinematic work was still new and it was given last place in the printed description of Élisabeth Thuillier's exhibit for the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Its length reflects the wide scope of Thuillier's business:[3]

Colours and colouring. Raw materials for tinting. Negative and positive photographs, on paper, on glass, on silk, on leather, on celluloid parchment. Stereoscopic prints on glass, coloured slides. Photochromy and artistic colour photographs. Film colouring for cinematography.[3]

The Exposition jury awarded her a bronze medal.[3]

The Thuillier studio kept on more than 200 employees, all women, to handle the film commissions they undertook. In a 1929 interview, Berthe Thuillier recollected spending her nights selecting colours and trying out samples.[4] She described her colours for film as "fine" aniline dyes, creating transparent and luminous tones. These dyes were dissolved first in water and then in alcohol. Each colourist was assigned a single tone, tinting specific parts of each frame before passing the film on to the next worker, in assembly line fashion.[4] Some areas to be coloured were so small that a paintbrush containing only a single horsehair was used.[5]

The Thuilliers and their workers probably used four basic dyes: orange, a cyan-like blue-green, magenta, and bright yellow. These could be mixed to create other colours. The tones produced also changed depending the shade of grey of the film underneath.[6] Some films used more than twenty distinct colours, and all the work was done by hand.[4] The workshop was in the 7th arrondissement of Paris at 40 Rue de Varenne; around 1908 it moved to another building nearby, 87 Rue du Bac.[1]

According to Berthe Thuillier's recollections, her studio typically produced about 60 coloured copies of each film they took on. For 300 metres of hand-coloured film, the cost was about 6 or 7 thousand francs per copy.[4]

Clients

 
Restoration of original hand-coloured frame from Méliès' Trip to the Moon

The Thuilliers handled all colouring work on Méliès' films from 1897 to 1912.[7] The studio's work on Méliès's films was international; for example, the American distribution company Selig Polyscope negotiated with Méliès to have its prints shipped to France to be coloured by the Thuilliers' workers.[5]

The Thuillier studio was also employed by the major French film studio Pathé, from 1898 or earlier through around 1912.[1] In 1906 the Thuilliers were in negotiations to work exclusively for Pathé, but called off the agreement when it was made clear that they would have to share authority with a Mme. Florimond, whose husband was a key employee there.[7] Another customer was experimental film-maker Raoul Grimoin-Sanson, according to his memoirs,[2] although these are known to be undependable.[1]

The pioneering director Segundo de Chomón was not a client but was introduced to the Thuilliers' techniques of hand-colouring through his wife Julienne Mathieu. Mathieu (Mme. Chaumont or Chomón) had worked in the Thuillier workshop, as a supervisor according to some sources,[8] as well as acting in silent movies. Chomón soon moved on to adding colour with stencils.[2]

Later life

Élisabeth Thuillier's health declined at the end of her life, she died on 7 July 1907. (Her cemetery plaque cites the year as 1904, apparently an error.) During the peak period of her film colouring work, Berthe Thuillier married a second husband, the lawyer Eugène Beaupuy; she was widowed sometime before 1922–24. At that point, she moved to Forceville-en-Vimeu, where both her parents were buried, and lived there until her death in 1947.[1]

The Thuillier hand-painting method was a relatively slow, expensive way of colouring reels of film, and the world of cinema eventually moved towards using stencils instead of freehand colouring; this was more efficient for multiple copies.[2] The last known Thuillier client was Georges Dufayel,[4] whose impressive department store Grands Magasins Dufayel housed a cinema and other attractions. In her 1929 interview, Berthe Thuillier expressed regrets about the disappearance of her craft.[4]

In December 1929, she was invited to a gala given in Méliès' honour at Salle Pleyel.[9] Several films were shown, including A Trip to the Moon. For this event, "extremely delicate" colour restoration work was undertaken by two Thuillier "pupils", according to Cinéa magazine.[10] (Records indicate that this colouring was handled by a Paris cinematographic laboratory, Ateliers Fantasia; the two women cited in the magazine may have worked for this studio and been trained by the Thuilliers, but they have not been identified.)[1] Since the original negatives had been destroyed, the women removed the colour from old positive copies of the films, made new negatives, then new positives, and re-coloured those.[10] (Thuillier remarked to the press that if she had had sufficient time, she would have done the work herself.)[4] Méliès introduced her in his speech at the gala as an "eminent artist" who did her work with a "remarkable talent".[9] The audience applauded and called "bravo".[11]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Salmon, Stéphanie; Malthête, Jacques (2020), "Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier", in Gaines, Jane; Vatsal, Radha; Dall'Asta, Monica (eds.), Women Film Pioneers Project, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries, retrieved June 17, 2020
  2. ^ a b c d e Yumibe, Joshua (2013), "French Film Colorists", in Gaines, Jane; Vatsal, Radha; Dall'Asta, Monica (eds.), Women Film Pioneers Project, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries, retrieved 16 June 2016
  3. ^ a b c Toulet, Emmanuelle (April 1986), "Le cinéma à l'Exposition universelle de 1900", Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (in French), XXXIII: 182–183, JSTOR 20529217, Couleurs et coloris. Matières premières colorantes. Photographies négatives et positives, sur papier, sur verre, sur soie, sur cuir, sur parchemin celluloïd. Épreuves stéréoscopiques sur verres, et vues à projections en couleurs. Photochromie et photographies artistiques en couleurs. Coloris de films pour cinématographe.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Mazeline, François (13 December 1929), "Mme Thullier nous rappelle… le temps où le cinéma ne manquait pas de couleurs", L'Ami du Peuple. Quoted in Mélies, Georges (October 1982), "Allocution au gala Méliès", Les dossiers de la cinémathèque: 34–36.
  5. ^ a b Kizirian, Shari (14 March 2013), "The Color of Silents", Keyframe, Fandor.com, retrieved 17 June 2016
  6. ^ Malthête-Méliès, Madeleine; Quévrain, Anne-Marie; Malthête, Jacques (1981), "Avertissement", Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film; suivi d'une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France, Bois d'Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, pp. 5–11, ISBN 2903053073, OCLC 10506429
  7. ^ a b Yumibe, Joshua (2012), Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 84, 166
  8. ^ "Des trésors de films dans le domaine public. Europa Film Treasures", La Revue des Ressources, 29 January 2013, retrieved 16 June 2016
  9. ^ a b Mélies, Georges (October 1982), "Allocution au gala Méliès", Les dossiers de la cinémathèque: 34–36
  10. ^ a b "L'Activité cinégraphique", Cinéa: 26, 15 December 1929
  11. ^ Bessy, Maurice; Duca, Lo (1945), Georges Méliès, mage, Paris: Prisma, p. 194

External links

  • Demonstration of the Thuilliers' colouring process at francetv.fr (in French)
  • http://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-women-hand-painted-first-color-films: "With a growing demand for professional film-coloring, some female colorists even opened their own studios, where they employed their own legions of young painters. One such French colorist was Elisabeth Thuillier, who owned and operated a workshop that worked on films for renowned director Georges Méliès from 1897 to 1912. Obsessively meticulous, Thuillier spent her nights sampling colors and planning palettes. By day, her crew of some 220 female workers executed her templates, delicately coating films with water-soluble aniline dye. Each woman applied a single shade at a time, in a rainbow-like Ford assembly line—a film could contain more than 20 distinct hues. Coloring each print of Méliès’s most famous work, Trip to the Moon (1902), required painting a grand total of 13,375 film frames."

February 06, 2023
Élisabeth, berthe, thuillier, Élisabeth, thuillier, née, aléné, 1841, july, 1907, marie, berthe, thuillier, 1867, 1947, were, mother, daughter, team, french, colourists, they, workshop, paris, where, their, employees, hand, coloured, early, films, photographic. Elisabeth Thuillier nee Alene 1841 7 July 1907 and Marie Berthe Thuillier 1867 1947 were a mother daughter team of French colourists They ran a workshop in Paris where their employees hand coloured early films and photographic slides using their plans and colour choices They are remembered especially for the work they did for the director Georges Melies Letterhead used by Berthe Thuillier with pictures of the medals she had won Contents 1 Early lives 2 Colourist work 3 Clients 4 Later life 5 References 6 External linksEarly lives EditElisabeth Alene was born in Guenange in 1841 She was one of seven children of a Catholic farming family She and three older siblings moved to Paris around 1848 50 during a period of mass migrations to cities spurred on by the Revolutions of 1848 and the 1846 1860 cholera pandemic 1 She worked variously as a cook and house servant before being hired to work for A Binant an art dealer and art supply merchant Alene gave birth to two children in 1864 and 1865 both died soon after and the father or fathers went unlisted in official records In 1867 she had a third child Marie Berthe known as Berthe with Jules Arthur Thuillier of Forceville en Vimeu 1846 1875 He legally recognized the child at the time of birth and he and Elisabeth Alene were married in 1874 He died the following year leaving no funds for his wife it was probably at this time that Elisabeth Thuillier went into business for herself as a photograph colourist 1 In 1888 when Berthe Thuillier was about twenty one she married a sculpture student Eugene Boutier Boutier had displayed a bust of Mlle B T likely his future wife at the Academie des Beaux Arts Salon the year before The couple lived among the Parisian art community in Montmartre Berthe Thuillier worked as a photographer around this time very unusually for a woman in nineteenth century France She gave birth to a daughter Georgette in 1889 She separated from her husband in 1902 and obtained a divorce from him in 1906 1 Colourist work EditElisabeth Thuillier had experience in colouring slides for magic lanterns and in other kinds of photographic and colour work 2 Berthe Thuillier may have joined the work in 1887 when she was nineteen she continued it as the head of the workforce after her mother s death 1 The Thuilliers had started colouring film by 1897 2 This cinematic work was still new and it was given last place in the printed description of Elisabeth Thuillier s exhibit for the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 Its length reflects the wide scope of Thuillier s business 3 Colours and colouring Raw materials for tinting Negative and positive photographs on paper on glass on silk on leather on celluloid parchment Stereoscopic prints on glass coloured slides Photochromy and artistic colour photographs Film colouring for cinematography 3 The Exposition jury awarded her a bronze medal 3 The Thuillier studio kept on more than 200 employees all women to handle the film commissions they undertook In a 1929 interview Berthe Thuillier recollected spending her nights selecting colours and trying out samples 4 She described her colours for film as fine aniline dyes creating transparent and luminous tones These dyes were dissolved first in water and then in alcohol Each colourist was assigned a single tone tinting specific parts of each frame before passing the film on to the next worker in assembly line fashion 4 Some areas to be coloured were so small that a paintbrush containing only a single horsehair was used 5 The Thuilliers and their workers probably used four basic dyes orange a cyan like blue green magenta and bright yellow These could be mixed to create other colours The tones produced also changed depending the shade of grey of the film underneath 6 Some films used more than twenty distinct colours and all the work was done by hand 4 The workshop was in the 7th arrondissement of Paris at 40 Rue de Varenne around 1908 it moved to another building nearby 87 Rue du Bac 1 According to Berthe Thuillier s recollections her studio typically produced about 60 coloured copies of each film they took on For 300 metres of hand coloured film the cost was about 6 or 7 thousand francs per copy 4 Clients Edit Restoration of original hand coloured frame from Melies Trip to the Moon The Thuilliers handled all colouring work on Melies films from 1897 to 1912 7 The studio s work on Melies s films was international for example the American distribution company Selig Polyscope negotiated with Melies to have its prints shipped to France to be coloured by the Thuilliers workers 5 The Thuillier studio was also employed by the major French film studio Pathe from 1898 or earlier through around 1912 1 In 1906 the Thuilliers were in negotiations to work exclusively for Pathe but called off the agreement when it was made clear that they would have to share authority with a Mme Florimond whose husband was a key employee there 7 Another customer was experimental film maker Raoul Grimoin Sanson according to his memoirs 2 although these are known to be undependable 1 The pioneering director Segundo de Chomon was not a client but was introduced to the Thuilliers techniques of hand colouring through his wife Julienne Mathieu Mathieu Mme Chaumont or Chomon had worked in the Thuillier workshop as a supervisor according to some sources 8 as well as acting in silent movies Chomon soon moved on to adding colour with stencils 2 Later life EditElisabeth Thuillier s health declined at the end of her life she died on 7 July 1907 Her cemetery plaque cites the year as 1904 apparently an error During the peak period of her film colouring work Berthe Thuillier married a second husband the lawyer Eugene Beaupuy she was widowed sometime before 1922 24 At that point she moved to Forceville en Vimeu where both her parents were buried and lived there until her death in 1947 1 The Thuillier hand painting method was a relatively slow expensive way of colouring reels of film and the world of cinema eventually moved towards using stencils instead of freehand colouring this was more efficient for multiple copies 2 The last known Thuillier client was Georges Dufayel 4 whose impressive department store Grands Magasins Dufayel housed a cinema and other attractions In her 1929 interview Berthe Thuillier expressed regrets about the disappearance of her craft 4 In December 1929 she was invited to a gala given in Melies honour at Salle Pleyel 9 Several films were shown including A Trip to the Moon For this event extremely delicate colour restoration work was undertaken by two Thuillier pupils according to Cinea magazine 10 Records indicate that this colouring was handled by a Paris cinematographic laboratory Ateliers Fantasia the two women cited in the magazine may have worked for this studio and been trained by the Thuilliers but they have not been identified 1 Since the original negatives had been destroyed the women removed the colour from old positive copies of the films made new negatives then new positives and re coloured those 10 Thuillier remarked to the press that if she had had sufficient time she would have done the work herself 4 Melies introduced her in his speech at the gala as an eminent artist who did her work with a remarkable talent 9 The audience applauded and called bravo 11 References Edit a b c d e f g h i Salmon Stephanie Malthete Jacques 2020 Elisabeth and Berthe Thuillier in Gaines Jane Vatsal Radha Dall Asta Monica eds Women Film Pioneers Project Center for Digital Research and Scholarship Columbia University Libraries retrieved June 17 2020 a b c d e Yumibe Joshua 2013 French Film Colorists in Gaines Jane Vatsal Radha Dall Asta Monica eds Women Film Pioneers Project Center for Digital Research and Scholarship Columbia University Libraries retrieved 16 June 2016 a b c Toulet Emmanuelle April 1986 Le cinema a l Exposition universelle de 1900 Revue d histoire moderne et contemporaine in French XXXIII 182 183 JSTOR 20529217 Couleurs et coloris Matieres premieres colorantes Photographies negatives et positives sur papier sur verre sur soie sur cuir sur parchemin celluloid Epreuves stereoscopiques sur verres et vues a projections en couleurs Photochromie et photographies artistiques en couleurs Coloris de films pour cinematographe a b c d e f g Mazeline Francois 13 December 1929 Mme Thullier nous rappelle le temps ou le cinema ne manquait pas de couleurs L Ami du Peuple Quoted in Melies Georges October 1982 Allocution au gala Melies Les dossiers de la cinematheque 34 36 a b Kizirian Shari 14 March 2013 The Color of Silents Keyframe Fandor com retrieved 17 June 2016 Malthete Melies Madeleine Quevrain Anne Marie Malthete Jacques 1981 Avertissement Essai de reconstitution du catalogue francais de la Star Film suivi d une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Melies recenses en France Bois d Arcy Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinematographie pp 5 11 ISBN 2903053073 OCLC 10506429 a b Yumibe Joshua 2012 Moving Color Early Film Mass Culture Modernism New Brunswick NJ Rutgers University Press pp 84 166 Des tresors de films dans le domaine public Europa Film Treasures La Revue des Ressources 29 January 2013 retrieved 16 June 2016 a b Melies Georges October 1982 Allocution au gala Melies Les dossiers de la cinematheque 34 36 a b L Activite cinegraphique Cinea 26 15 December 1929 Bessy Maurice Duca Lo 1945 Georges Melies mage Paris Prisma p 194External links EditDemonstration of the Thuilliers colouring process at francetv fr in French http www artsy net article artsy editorial forgotten women hand painted first color films With a growing demand for professional film coloring some female colorists even opened their own studios where they employed their own legions of young painters One such French colorist was Elisabeth Thuillier who owned and operated a workshop that worked on films for renowned director Georges Melies from 1897 to 1912 Obsessively meticulous Thuillier spent her nights sampling colors and planning palettes By day her crew of some 220 female workers executed her templates delicately coating films with water soluble aniline dye Each woman applied a single shade at a time in a rainbow like Ford assembly line a film could contain more than 20 distinct hues Coloring each print of Melies s most famous work Trip to the Moon 1902 required painting a grand total of 13 375 film frames Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Elisabeth and Berthe Thuillier amp oldid 1008509782, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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