Émilia Possoz was born on 4 December 1888, in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, She was the daughter of Henri Émile Possoz (1856 – 1912), a former Belgian army artillery officer and chemical engineer, and Jeanne Anne Rosalie Leroy (1862 – 1937), 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1][2][4] 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.
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 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.
Central to the group were Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who had lived in Paris but were in Spain when war broke out, decided not to return and moved to Lisbon.
[1][2] During her visits to France, Possoz became an active member and only female partner of the society Jeune Gravure Contemporaine (Young Contemporary Engraving), which staged annual shows and was influential in keeping the spirit of printmaking alive.
The decision to stay in Paris may have been due to an invitation by the French poet, writer and essayist Valery Larbaud to illustrate one of his books.
An excellent designer, Possoz collaborated with Jorge Barradas and Alice Rey Colaço as a poster and stage designer for the play Zilda by Alfredo Cortez (1921), and as an illustrator in numerous publications, such as the magazines ABC, Athena, Contemporânea, Diário de Lisboa, and A Civilização, using woodcutting, lithography, watercolour, etching and drypoint techniques.
[1][2][3][4] In the 1950s and 1960s, at the invitation of her neighbour and friend Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos, Possoz began to collaborate with the Sociedade Cooperativa de Gravadores Portugueses, of which she remained a member until her death.
She began to give private lessons in painting and continued to illustrate books such as Bom Dia Tristeza (1954) by Françoise Sagan and Mascarados and popular masks of Trás-os-Montes (1960) by Sebastião Pessanha.
Despite her considerable work employing a variety of different techniques, and her international reputation, she is probably best-known in Portugal for a school book she illustrated in 1958 called Livro da segunda classe, which had a profound impact on students for many years.