Paule Charpentier, née Jacques-Joseph, was born into the black bourgeoisie of Fort-de-France. Her father, a cabinetmaker, owned a boutique at 29 rue Blénac, in the heart of the city. P. Charpentier began drawing at a very early age but her father refused to let her travel to Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts. Consequently obliged to give up her scholarship from the Ministry of the Colonies, she opted for private lessons under self-taught mixed-race Martinican painter Fernand Peux (1883-1956), a former soldier and a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Hanoi, who in the 1930s owned a boutique-studio at 6 Rue Amiral Gueydon.

At the age of 24 she married the painter Hector Charpentier (1910-1983) and the couple set up home in the François region. The young P. Charpentier showed her works for the first time in 1936, against the backdrop of Martinique’s Tricentennial celebrations. The Second World War marked a shift in the conceptualisation of West Indian art, challenging and rejecting the Western canon and colonial art under the banner of Négritude. This aesthetic and thematic rebellion manifested itself through the determination of Afro-Caribbean artists to reclaim their African cultural identity. From 1945 to 1950 the Charpentiers owned a gallery on Rue Bertin in the city of Saint-Pierre and another in the Morne-Rouge area. There P. Charpentier created impasto paintings that captured, through dynamic and at times dizzying compositions, Saint-Pierre’s comforting, familiar atmosphere, bursting with human figures in motion, conveyed by juxtapositions of vibrant brushstrokes. Vidé du mercredi des Cendres [Ash Wednesday Parade], Le vidé du carnival [Carnival Parade], Bêle [Folk Dance] and Le Combat de Coqs [Cockfight], all undated, encapsulate her predilection for folk dancing and popular gatherings and traditions. A highly prolific artist, her painting sought to depict the essence of West Indian culture by perpetuating the aspirations of the artists of the time, within the context of Martinique, where the black population remained largely working-class. P. Charpentier was influenced by the paintings of Rembrandt, Renoir and the Impressionists, who shaped her vision of portraiture and landscape. She favoured charcoal and oil paint, and used embossed metal varnishes. Her trail-blazing technique consisted in using a knife or spatula to spread an extravagant pictorial layer, thereby creating a vibration across the surface. Like her colleague, the painter Alexandre Bertrand (1918-1995), a professor at the École des Arts Appliqués, she studied the morphology of the local population in a quest for authenticity and stylistic accuracy.

P. Charpentier was one of the island’s rare black female artists, running two art galleries and also teaching drawing. Her son Hector Charpentier (b. 1950), who is also a painter, graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Toulouse and conducts a prestigious career. Paule Charpentier’s entire oeuvre is filled with ingenuity. Her works feature in family and private collections, in Martinique and Europe, and are also housed in the military fort of Desaix in Martinique and in local government collections.