Charles Johann Palmié was born at Aschersleben on 22 October 1893. At the age of fourteen, Palmié finished an apprenticeship as a decoration painter and worked in Dresden as a pupil of Rieck's, theatre decoration painter to the court, before beginning his studies at the Dresden Academy. Even then the aspiring young artist succeeded in making good use of the hands-on experience he had acquired by working on large-scale commissions: in 1883 what is now the Leonhardi-Museum in Dresden (then owned by the painter Eduard Leonhardi) was extensively renovated in the Romanticizing 19th-century style and was treated to a rich repainting by Palmié. The building was used for exhibitions and studios.
In 1884 Charles Johann Palmié moved from Dresden to Munich, where he completed his training as a pupil of August Fink's. After his marriage to the flower painter Marie Kapferer in 1886, Palmié freelanced. Regular trips to the Alps, from the 1890s also to the Altmühltal Valley, the Wörnitz and the Danube, inspired Charles Johann Palmié to execute Neo-Impressionist paintings in large formats. Palmié was a founder-member of the Munich Neue Künstlervereinigung in 1909, which was headed by Wassily Kandinsky. Disagreements about art made Palmié leave the NKVM before its first exhibition in winter 1909.
Only two years later Charles Palmié died in Munich on 15 July 1911. Before his untimely death, Palmié had made a name for himself as a landscape and still-life painter.