[1] Yvonne Chevalier, née Gaulard, was born into a well-to-do Catholic family on 18 January 1899 in the 9th arrondissement of Paris where she completed her primary and secondary education before studying painting and drawing.
[3] Russian émigré writer Pierre Tugal interviewed the couple for an article “The masters of photography” in La Revue du Médecin of May[4] that year which was illustrated predominantly with her photographs in the 'New Vision' modernist style for which she and Denise Bellon, Florence Henri, Nora Dumas and Ergy Landau are known.
"[4]Chevalier joined Jean Moral, Daniel Masclet, and Emmanuel Sougez as one of the main French photographers of the loosely affiliated group of mostly immigrant inter-war modernists, The School of Paris.
[3] The Chevalier couple made friends of personalities in literature, the visual arts and music, whom she photographed,[6][7] recording portraits of Arthur Honegger, André Gide (and in 1951, his death mask), Colette, Mariette Lydis, Camille Claudel, François Mauriac, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Max Jacob, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the bookseller Adrienne Monnier and her friends, and intimate studies of writer and Resistance fighter Jean Prévost.
At their 1946 exhibition at the 17th Art Salon,[14] president of the jury J. M. Auradon remarked on her work;"...the portrait by Yvonne Chevalier on the previous panel, reveals in Tuefferd a delicate sensibility, which vibrates in its atmosphere of light grays, comparable to pencil drawings in manner and genre.
"[15]In the following year at the Second National Salon of Photography in Paris, Auradon praised as "assez mystérieuse" her Ophélie, inspired by the death mask of l'Inconnue de la Seine,[16] while journalist Germain Paterne considered it "a remarkable idea, but….