Guillaume Pujolle worked from adolescence in his father’s cabinetmaking workshop; his father was a compulsive gambler deeply in debt. He enlisted in the army in 1913 and remained mobilized until the end of the First World War. In 1924, he married and became a customs officer in Metz. A domestic tyrant obsessed with order and pathologically jealous, he terrorized his wife.
In 1926, a suicide attempt led to hospitalization. After returning home, he again suffered hallucinations, threatened his wife—who he believed was cheating on and spying on him—and endangered their lives. He was then permanently committed to the psychiatric hospital in Toulouse. His wife, unwilling to abandon him, was allowed to work there as a nurse.
Pujolle began drawing in 1935, drawing inspiration from newspapers. In addition to ink and gouache, he often used pharmaceutical products such as iodine tincture or mercurochrome. His tools, kept in a locked wooden box, consisted of a compass, a ruler, and brushes he made from his own hair. His fantastical world, populated by nocturnal birds and strange figures, is dominated by swirling movements, with menace omnipresent. At the instigation of Dr. Gaston Ferdière, who collected his works, the psychiatrist Jean Dequeker devoted a thesis to him in 1948 entitled Monograph of a Psychopathic Draftsman: A Study of His Style.