Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier

They ran a workshop in Paris, where their employees hand-coloured early films and photographic slides using their plans and colour choices.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

[5] The Thuilliers and their workers probably used four basic dyes: orange, a cyan-like blue-green, magenta, and bright yellow.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.