By the age of seven, Séraphine Louis Maillart (1864-1942) was already an orphan. She lived for six years with her older sister then, like most girls from poor families at the time, got a job as a servant. She worked in a convent then for different families in the town of Senlis.
One of the people she worked for was Wilhem Uhde, a German art dealer. In 1912 as he was visiting his neighbors he complimented them on a small painting they owned, only to learn that the artist was no other than his own servant Séraphine.
This woman had never opened an art book nor had she visited an art exhibition and yet her paintings were remarkable enough to surprise a connoisseur like Uhde. He encouraged Séraphine to paint but soon WWI broke out and Uhde went back to Germany.
When he came back to-France some years later, he saw three of Séraphine’s paintings in a local exhibition, bought them and went back to Senlist to see her. He regularly bought her production thus enabling her to buy paints and canvas. Meanwhile Séraphine had become popular in Parisian circles and she sold paintings to a variety of people, including visitors from abroad.
Yet she remained as solitary as when she was a child, had no friends and suffered from dementia. Uhde had been hit hard by the Great Depression and stopped buying her paintings. Séraphine was admitted to the psychiatric ward of a geriatric hospital where she died of starvation in 1942.
2 Comments
November 19, 2008 at 11:37 am
The cover to the book is striking: a lovely combination of dark reds on pale green. Sounds like a sad story, in some ways, although I suppose achieving some recognition for her talents seems somewhat gratifying.
November 19, 2008 at 11:05 pm
The name of this painting is actually Pomegranates on a green background.