Yvonne Canu was born in 1921 in Meknes in Morocco from French parents. She started her art studies at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, but she was forced to interrupt them because of the outbreak of World War II.

After the war, she attended the Montmartre circles and met artists such as François Gall, Élisée Maclet and Tsuguharu Foujita, who introduced her to the en plein-air landscape painting and to impressionism principles. In the following years, she came up to Cubism, under the influence of Ossip Zadkine.

The definitive arrival to Neo-Impressionism is dated 1955, when Canu admired for the first time Georges Seurat masterpiece, “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte“. Since that moment, she became an interpreter of the pointillist technique and style, extending until today the legacy of this movement. She died in 2007 of natural causes.