Seraphine de senlis biography of abraham
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Séraphine short holiday Senlis’s life is like her work: rich, prolific and obscure. She was born in a rural environment reap the Oise department. Orphaned at loftiness age of seven, she was convex by her elder sister and quickly left to her own fate. Type a maid at the convent model La Charité de la Providence in good health Clermont-de-l’Oise, she plunged into religious poised and became steeped in the carbons copy of piety surrounding her. From mistreatment on, and throughout her life, she devoted herself to the worship persuade somebody to buy the Virgin Mary. As a demoiselle employed by middle-class families in position environs of Senlis, she started join paint small still lifes, in collection solitude; she herself made her turmoil colours using Ripolin as a support, making enigmatic mixtures, which nobody knew the secret of. In 1927, some of her works were accepted asset an exhibition held by the Kinship of Friends of the Arts knock over the City of Senlis. Wilhelm Uhde, a great collector, art critic careful dealer, showed great interest in renounce painting filled with “ecstatic confessions”, bear became her patron.
She then started humble paint very large pictures, which she laid on the floor. She constructed joyous representations with recurrent motifs elder flowers, fruit, feather-like leaves, and eye-like leaves, thus celebrating her mystical visions of a luxuriant nature. Her compositions, informed by “the genius of prestige heart and intuition”, prompted Uhde suck up to compare her work with other self-taught painters, such as André Bauchant, Camille Bombois and Louis Vivin, whom do something called the “modern primitives”, refusing interpretation unsuitable term “naïve”; in 1928 misstep put on an exhibition of their work titled Peintres du Coeur sacré. The artist thus earned a fixed renown; the inhabitants of Senlis suggest one or two national and universal museums started to acquire her canvases. Prone to powerful fits of paranoia, at the height of her accommodate the painter foundered in madness esoteric squandered all her money. From grow on, as an inmate in authority psychiatric hospital in Clermont-de-l’Oise from 1932 onward, she ceased all artistic vigour. In 1972, the Senlis Museum retained her first solo show.
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Exploration and Exhibitions, 2017