Paulette Van Roekens

The American artist Paulette Van Roekens was born in farmhouse outside of Château-Thierry, France late New Year's Eve 1895. At a minor age, she emigrated to the United States taking into consideration her parents, Victor (a horticulturalist) and Jeanne van Roekens, to reside in Glenside, Pennsylvania.

In 1915, Van Roekens enrolled in the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), where she was awarded the John Sartain Fellowship (1916). She also attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and studied sculpture at the Graphic Sketch Club of Philadelphia. She as a consequence studied under Henry B. Snell, Leopold Seyffert, Joseph Pearson, and Charles Grafly. She became a professor at the Moore College of Art in drawing and painting in 1923, a viewpoint she held for re 40 years. At the times of her retirement in 1961, the College presented her as soon as an honorary doctorate.

In 1927 she married a belong to at Moore, Arthur Meltzer, 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 land of their lives. They each had a studio in the intimates home, but painted subjects from New York as with ease as uncovered 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 even though she was strongly influenced by impressionism she found it difficult to completely crack with academic drawing. She exhibited throughout her career, with 14 solo exhibitions (her first in 1920) and two retrospective exhibitions considering her husband. Her unmovable exhibition was and no-one else a few months since her death on January 11, 1988.

Her sham 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. She held memberships in the Art Alliance of America and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.