Paulette Van Roekens
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Paulette Van Roekens
The American artist Paulette Van Roekens was born in Chateau –Thierry, France late New Years Eve 1895. Something of a prodigy, she was awarded the John Sartain Fellowship at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design). She also attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and studied sculpture at the Graphic Sketch Club of Philadelphia.
She became a professor at the Moore College of Art in drawing and painting in 1923, a position she held for almost 40 years. At Moore she earned an LHD in 1941.
In 1927 she married a colleague at Moore, Arthur Melzer, a respected artist in his own right.. They had two children, Davis Paul and Joanne. She and Melzer lived in the Philadelphia area for the rest of their lives. They each had a studio in the family home, but painted subjects from New York as well as outdoor scenes from excursions to Europe
She worked in a variety of media and is well known for her oils and pastels. Still-lifes are prominent in her early work, but as her career developed she turned more and more to landscapes. She called herself a “sometimes impressionist” because while she was strongly influenced by impressionism she found it difficult to completely break with academic drawing. She exhibited throughout her career; her first solo exhibit in 1920 and her last only a few months before her death in 1988.
Her work is represented at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Academy of Design, the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Mint Museum (Charlotte, N.C.), the Albright Gallery, and the Detroit Institute of Art.