Paul Fontaine

Paul Fontaine (1913–1996) was an American painter.

Abstract-colorist painter Paul Emile Fontaine was born in 1913 in Worcester, Massachusetts to Elzear and Mary Fontaine, both of French Canadian descent. Fontaine had two brothers, Russell and Leo Fontaine, both younger. Paul Fontaine was early on encouraged to be a painter, deciding to pursue this artistic path as a teenager. He was enrolled at the Worcester Art Museum School following completion of high school, and remained there from 1932 to 1935. Fontaine graduated in 1935, and followed his studies with a six-month term in the Civilian Conservation Corps. In 1936, Fontaine worked as a Works Progress Administration (or Section of Fine Arts, US Treasury) painter in Springfield, Massachusetts, painting murals in the city’s Post Office under Umberto Romano. Like many WPA murals, these contained images of Springfield and Massachusetts history in a bold, proletarian style, full of expressive movement and hard edges. In six panels, these murals now decorate Springfield’s federal building.

Following employment as a WPA painter, Fontaine was encouraged to continue his studies at Yale’s prestigious art school. Francis H. Taylor, director of the Worcester Art Museum, secured a matching grant for Fontaine to engage further studies at Yale University, the only time the Worcester Art Museum School donated significant funds to a student’s career. Fontaine began at Yale in 1938 and graduated among the top of his class in 1940. Fontaine was awarded the Winchester Wirt Traveling Fellowship the same year, but due to wartime exigencies, chose instead to study and paint in the Caribbean.

Paul Fontaine married fellow Yale art student Virginia Hammersmith in 1940. Virginia Fontaine was trained as a painter at Yale but did not graduate, and she became a major force in Paul’s subsequent creative activities. Virginia was born in 1915 to Paul and Myrtle Hammersmith of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (founders of the Hammersmith Printing Company). Following their marriage the Fontaines went to the British Virgin Islands, primarily Tortola, on Paul’s fellowship, where he first began to extensively explore abstract forms in his watercolors. Meanwhile, Virginia Fontaine was a skilled photographer, regular diarist and frequent documenter of their lives together. Thus, experiences in the Virgin Islands were noted in both her pictures and words.

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