Born in Épinal to a playing card maker father from Mauvages in the Meuse, he succeeded his father in 1773 as head of the "Fabrique de Pellerin". After working as a watchmaker, he expanded his business in 1796 and created the Imagerie Pellerin, revolutionizing the production of popular images through colored woodcuts with stencils.
Its major innovation lay in the industrialization of what had until then been a craft. From 1800 onwards, it developed a mass production of religious images, almanacs, feats of arms, legends and tales, distributed by peddling from town to town. Imagerie Pellerin notably enjoyed its heyday with paper dolls, fashion dolls to be cut out of English prints with removable wardrobes.
In 1822, during the Restoration, he transferred his business to his son Nicolas (born in 1793) and his son-in-law Pierre-Germain Vadet, who modernized the company by abandoning wood engraving for lithography from 1840. The business was then taken over by his grandson Charles-Nicolas Pellerin (1827-1887) from 1853, a period during which the printing house employed 66 workers, then 140 in 1860.
Jean-Charles Pellerin's legacy extends far beyond his time: he created a lasting cultural phenomenon, to which the phrase "Epinal image" still bears witness today. His entrepreneurial genius transformed local artisanal production into a national industry, helping to democratize access to images and forge the French collective imagination.
