No I
Hot-Pressed
Smooth as still water. Built for botanical illustration, the most exacting line work, and washes that need to keep their edges rather than bloom.
- Weight300 / 425 g
- FibreCotton
- SizingInternal & surface
Filmed in the atelier — scroll to play.
A sheet of paper is not a surface. It is the first collaborator in every painting that touches it.
— Maison Belle Époque, est. 1887
Founded above a printer's shop on the rue de Seine in the spring of 1887, Belle Époque Atelier began with a single deckle, a copper vat, and a singular idea — that the paper beneath a painting was not a stage, but a partner in the work.
Five generations later, every sheet still passes through human hands. Cotton fibre, drawn from the long-staple of the Languedoc, is beaten in a Hollander, hand-formed on the wire, couched between woollen felts, and pressed under the same beam press the founder commissioned from a vintner in Bordeaux.
Time, in the atelier, is the most honoured ingredient. A single sheet may take seven weeks from fibre to finished good — slowly, gently, the way a watercolour itself prefers to begin.
Each finish is born of the same fibre, the same vat, the same hand. The difference is only in the press — and in what the artist asks of it.
Smooth as still water. Built for botanical illustration, the most exacting line work, and washes that need to keep their edges rather than bloom.
The atelier's most-loved surface. Enough tooth to break a wash into life, smooth enough for fine drawing. The painter's first choice for a reason.
For the painter who wants the paper to speak. Pronounced tooth, dramatic granulation, light catching in every valley of the surface. Made for landscape, for atmosphere, for risk.
Long-staple cotton from the south of France is washed in spring water, then beaten in the Hollander for fourteen hours until the fibre opens like a slow flower.
Each sheet is formed by hand on a copper-wired mould, then couched onto woollen felt — the moment the paper finds its first true face, and where its watermark is born.
Stacks of couched sheets are pressed beneath an oak beam press once owned by a Bordeaux vigneron. The pressure determines the surface — smooth, fine-grained, or rough.
Sheets are dipped in a warm gelatine size and hung in the loft to dry slowly in the rising air of the Marais — the final, traditional step that decides how a paper drinks colour.
A small selection of recent commissions and student works painted on Belle Époque sheets.
Every sheet that leaves the atelier passes through the hands of a working painter, never a machine. The faint thumb-print at the corner, the soft variation of a hand-mixed wash — these are not flaws. They are how you know the paper was finished in our studio and not stamped out in a factory.
— Marie-Hélène, atelier painter since 2007
Once a season, the studio sends a quiet note — new sheets, exhibitions of artists working on our paper, occasional invitations to the open atelier in the Marais.
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