The painter and teacher Paulette van Roekens was born in Château-Thierry, France, and immigrated to the United States with her parents, settling near Philadelphia. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), where she later became a professor of painting and drawing. She married another Moore instructor, Arthur Meltzer ( ), in 1927. The couple lived in Bucks County, where they often exhibited with other Pennsylvania Impressionists at the Phillips Mill Community Association, and later in Huntington Valley, near Philadelphia. Van Roekens was a member of the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. She won the Pennsylvania Academy’s Fellowship award in 1928 and gold medals at the Plastic Club and the Sketch Club in Philadelphia. Van Roekens exhibited at various Philadelphia galleries and art institutions as well as the National Academy of Design in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Boston Art Club, and the Newport Art Association.