Every master was once an apprentice. In 1974, in a quiet studio in Nantes, a young Eric Stocker met the man who would shape the rest of his life — Pierre Bobot, painter, lacquer artist, and one of the last living links to the golden age of Art Deco.
A Living Bridge to Another Era
Pierre Bobot was not famous in the way the world usually measures fame. He did not seek the spotlight. But within the rarefied world of European lacquer, his name carried immense weight. Bobot had worked alongside Jean Dunand and Eileen Gray — titans of the Art Deco movement whose lacquered panels, screens, and furniture defined an era of decorative ambition. By the 1970s, most of that generation had passed. Bobot remained, carrying within his hands a knowledge that existed nowhere in books.
When Eric arrived at Bobot's studio, he was eighteen years old and restless with curiosity. What he found was not the dramatic atelier of popular imagination but a modest, immaculately ordered workspace where every tool had its place and every gesture had its reason. Bobot was exacting. He demanded not just technical precision but a philosophical commitment — an understanding that lacquer was not a medium to be conquered but a material to be served.
"Bobot never said 'I will teach you.' He said 'Watch. And when you are ready, I will correct you.' The teaching was in the silence between corrections."
The Discipline of Thirty Coats
Under Bobot's tutelage, Eric learned the European tradition of natural lacquer — a tradition that had been imported from Asia centuries earlier and adapted to French decorative arts. The discipline was severe. Thirty coats minimum. Each coat hand-applied, hand-polished, hand-inspected. No layer could be rushed. If a single coat was compromised, the entire surface had to be stripped and begun again. This was not punishment; it was principle. The integrity of the final surface depended on the integrity of every layer beneath it.
Bobot also taught something less tangible but equally vital: reverence for materials. The lacquer itself — whether European or Asian — was to be treated with respect bordering on devotion. It was alive, Bobot insisted. It responded to humidity, to temperature, to the mood of the hand that applied it. This was not mysticism. It was the hard-won empiricism of a lifetime spent listening to a material that speaks only to those patient enough to hear.
The Thread That Leads to Cambodia
Eric spent years absorbing Bobot's teaching before eventually moving to Paris and the Mobilier National. But the seed planted in Nantes never stopped growing. Decades later, when Eric arrived in Cambodia and discovered a lacquer tradition that predated anything in Europe by centuries, he recognized the same principles Bobot had taught him — patience, respect, and the understanding that true craftsmanship is not about the maker but about the material and the time it demands.
Pierre Bobot died having transmitted his knowledge to a handful of students. Eric Stocker became the one who carried it furthest — across continents, across traditions, into a future Bobot could not have imagined but would surely have recognized.
The Carnets d'Atelier are our workshop journals — reflections on craft, material, and the slow work of making things that endure.
Hero image: Pierre bobot by SilverLives, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Continue exploring:
What Eric did with Bobot's teaching — Twenty-Five Years at the Mobilier National. And how the lineage continued in Cambodia — 350 Hands, One Craft.
The full story arc on Our Story, and the techniques themselves on the Craft page.
