Mily Possoz, sometimes written as Milly (18881968), was a Portuguese artist of Belgian origin. She was one of the most prominent figures of the first generation of Portuguese modernist artists.
Early life
Émilia 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.
Like the daughters of all upper-middle-class families, the two sisters learned to play the piano. They were students of Alexandre Rey Colaço, who was also the teacher of the royal family. They became known for the entertainment they provided to visitors to the family house. During the summers the sisters and their mother returned to Belgium while their father continued to work in Lisbon. Their exposure to the arts continued as their paternal grandfather was a graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, where he was a professor. One of his brothers was an engraver by profession and her paternal grandmother was an amateur artist.
Early art training
While still young, Mily Possoz started attending the studios of watercolor artist Enrique Casanova (18501913), a Spanish naturalist painter and teacher of the Portuguese royal family, and of painter Emília dos Santos Braga (18671949), a disciple of José Malhoa and a painter who specialised in nudes, much to the horror of the Lisbon middle classes. Braga ran a school of painting, from which Mily Possoz and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992) emerged as her two most famous students. It was with Braga that Possoz first experimented with oil painting.
When his daughter was 16, her father contacted the French painter, Ernest Bordes, who had also done work for the Portuguese Royal Family, asking for advice on his daughter's work. The response was very positive, encouraging her father to allow her to continue her artistic training in Paris, where she attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, a school which aimed to teach art free from the restrictions of an academic education. During her stay she became a student of one of the founders of the Academy, Lucien Simon, and of Émile-René Ménard, and met artists such as the Portuguese artists Manuel Jardim and Eduardo Viana, who Possoz became engaged to in 1919, as well as Amedeo Modigliani. She began to explore new techniques and to take an interest in new avant-garde artistic movements. Unfortunately, her enjoyment of the bohemian Parisian life proved too much for her tolerant parents and she was recalled home in 1908. Pozzoz later went to Düsseldorf, Germany, where she took private lessons on engraving and lithography with Willy Spatz and also traveled through Belgium, Italy and Holland.