Mily Possoz

Emília "Mily" Possoz (18881968), was a Portuguese artist. She was one of the most prominent figures of the first generation of Portuguese modernist artists.

Early life Emilia Possoz was born on 4 December 1888, in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, She was the daughter of Henri Émile Possoz (18561912), a former Belgian army artillery officer and chemical engineer, and Jeanne Anne Rosalie Leroy (18621937), both Belgian citizens, who were born in Antwerp and Liège, respectively and had married in London in early 1888. At this time Portugal was seeking to open eight technical schools to teach industrial education to train qualified technicians for factories in the same vicinity. Her parents moved to Portugal in 1888 when her father was asked to be a professor of Chemistry at the Industrial School situated in Caldas da Rainha in the Leiria District of Portugal, which was close to a ceramics factory managed by the artist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro. They arrived in Lisbon on 2 December, just two days before Émilia's birth. She was not baptised until 8 June 1889, in the Parish Church of Caldas da Rainha.

After a few years the family moved to Lisbon, with her father taking a job as attorney and head of the maritime section in the firm Burnay & Cª, belonging to Henrique Burnay, the Second Count of Burnay, who had become very rich and eventually turned his company into the Burnay Bank. Mily and her sister Jeanne entered the Lisbon German School. After some years of difficulty the school reopened its doors in 1895, when it is likely the two sisters joined. Both had an oral command of the German language as their mother spoke German to them at home. Her father was later to be appointed Chancellor of the Consulate General of Belgium in Lisbon. Well-integrated with the small Belgian community in Lisbon and with the wider Lisbon society, the family got to know artists and other well-known figures, such as the painter Alfredo Roque Gameiro, and the pianists José Vianna da Motta and Alexandre Rey Colaço. Mily Possoz became particularly friendly with Colaço’s daughter, Alice, who also became an artist.

Early exhibits Returning to Portugal, Possoz divided her time between the Lapa part of Lisbon, almost always in the company of her sister Jeanne and her friend Alice Rey Colaço, and the family home in Estoril. Her father died in 1912. After the overthrow of the monarchy and rebelling against the conservatism of Portuguese society and its conventional approach to art, she joined the emerging modernist movement in Portugal. She started to exhibit at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (Society of Fine Arts) in 1909 and rapidly became known, being a regular exhibitor at the Society's annual salons until 1916. She would also exhibit at the Humourist and Modernist Exhibitions from 1913 to 1926, along with José de Almada Negreiros and others. She was one of the few female artists of her generation to organize individual exhibitions of her work, in oil painting, pencil drawing, gouache or watercolour. Invited to participate she was the only female exhibiting in the 2nd Exhibition of Humourists, in 1913, and in the Exhibition of the "Five Independents" in 1923. In a male-dominated society, Possoz was regarded as an equal by her fellow artists.