Pierre Emile Gabriel Lelong was a neo-Impressionist painter based in France, winner of the Grand Prix des Peintres Témoins de Leur Temps in 1972. He is considered one of the postwar group of artists referred to as “La Nouvelle Ecole de Paris.”

Pierre Emile Lelong was born in 1908 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. His father, Albert Lelong, was a military man from Alsace; his mother, Marie Odette Collot, came from a Parisian family. She died when Pierre was six years old, at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Pierre was brought up largely by his grandmother, Madeleine Collot and his great-aunt Huguette. He began to draw and paint at an early age.

In the 1920s he took classes at the Atelier Julien in Paris, but stopped painting in...