For twenty-five years, Eric Stocker worked within the walls of France's most prestigious decorative arts institution — the Mobilier National in Paris. There, surrounded by centuries of lacquered splendour, he learned to read the language of surfaces that masters had spoken long before him.
The Guardian of the Republic's Treasures
The Mobilier National is not a museum in the conventional sense. Founded in 1663 by Louis XIV as the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne, it is the custodian of the French Republic's collection of decorative arts — furniture, tapestries, carpets, and objects that have furnished the palaces, ministries, and embassies of France for over three centuries. Its workshops, housed in the Gobelins complex in the 13th arrondissement, employ some of the finest restorers and craftspeople in Europe. It was here, from 1980 to 1998, that Eric Stocker practised his art.
His speciality was lacquer restoration — specifically, the Chinese and Japanese lacquerwork that had entered French collections through centuries of diplomatic exchange, royal acquisition, and colonial encounter. These were not minor decorative objects. They were masterworks: Imperial Chinese cabinets from the Qing dynasty, Japanese namban screens from the sixteenth century, elaborate coromandel panels that had once adorned Versailles.
"To restore a piece of lacquer from the seventeenth century, you must first understand what the original maker intended. You are not imposing your vision — you are recovering theirs. The ego has no place in restoration."
Reading the Layers of History
Restoration of antique lacquer is a discipline of forensic patience. Before a single brushstroke is applied, the restorer must analyse the piece: identifying the type of lacquer used, the number of original layers, the pigments, the substrate, the history of previous restorations and repairs. Eric learned to read a lacquered surface the way a geologist reads rock strata — each layer telling a story of its time, its maker, and the conditions under which it was created.
The work itself was painstaking. Missing areas had to be rebuilt using materials and techniques as close to the original as possible. Colour matching required an understanding of how natural lacquer ages — how reds deepen, how blacks develop warmth, how gold leaf acquires the particular patina of centuries. A single cabinet might occupy months of full-time work, with every decision documented and every intervention reversible, in keeping with the strict conservation ethics of the institution.
Knowledge That Cannot Be Taught in Schools
What Eric gained at the Mobilier National went beyond technical skill. He developed an intimate understanding of Asian lacquer traditions through direct, sustained contact with their finest expressions. He handled pieces that no textbook could adequately describe — surfaces of such depth and refinement that they seemed to contain light itself. He learned the differences between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese lacquer not from academic study but from the evidence of his own hands.
When he left Paris for Cambodia in 1998, he carried this quarter-century of accumulated knowledge with him. It became the foundation upon which he built the workshop in Siem Reap — a place where the restoration techniques of the Mobilier National merged with the living lacquer tradition of Southeast Asia, creating something neither wholly European nor wholly Asian, but authentically both.
The Carnets d'Atelier are our workshop journals — reflections on craft, material, and the slow work of making things that endure.
Continue exploring:
The teacher who began this discipline in 1974 — Pierre Bobot, The Master's Master. What Eric did with that training in Cambodia — 350 Hands, One Craft.
The full arc on Our Story, and every technique on the Craft page.
