BIOGRAPHY - Yvonne Canu (1921 - 2008)

Yvonne Canu was a French neo-Impressionist painter mainly specializing in landscape and seascape. She initially studied at the École des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, but abandoned her education after the Second World War broke out. During the war, she worked as a nurse in North Africa, returning to Paris after the city's liberation from the occupying Germans. After the war, Canu lived in Montmartre, where she learned about plein-air painting from established artists in the area, such as Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886 - 1968). After a brief foray into Cubism, by 1955, Canu began to move towards neo-Impressionism after seeing the work of Georges Seurat. She developed a divisionist style similar to that of Maximilien Luce (1858 - 1941) and Paul Signac (1863 - 1935).[i]

[1] Ellen Wardwell Lee, The Aura of Neo-Impressionism: The W.J. Holliday Collection (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1983), 90.