The following will is a summary taken from: BIHALJI-Merino, Oto: Naive Art, ed. Labor, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b1978. ISBN: 84-335-7558-9, pp. 45-46 Footnotes are Mercedes García Bravo.
"Seraphine Louis, sometimes cited as Seraphine de Senlis, born in 1864 in Assy (Oise). Never studied painting, and during the times of his childhood, when he was pastor, or later, while working as a maid. [1] When did you start with shapes and colors translate their dreams and their impulses? Why would I? We know very little about the intimate drama of his little self. And perhaps even less than his art would know if fate had not met one man who, impressed by the imagination of Rousseau, followed the footsteps of the early modern. The ignorant world
took the humble servant of Senlis. But she had been called to see, to look through the racks perishable temporal, and to announce the eternity. (...) "
NOTES:
[1]-Séraphine Louis was born in Arsy (Oise) 3
September 1864. His father was a worker, as the birth certificate, and his mother came from a peasant family. When Seraphine had only a year her mother died. His father, who had remarried, died six years later. Orphaned, she lived with her older sister. He began working as a pastor, and from 1881 worked as assistant at the convent of the Sisters of Providence, in Clermont (Oise). In 1901 he began working as a servant in different houses of Senlis. [2]-Willhem Uhde: collector, art dealer, gallery owner and art critic, the name of Wilhelm Uhde is associated with the Parisian artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century. In 1908 he married the painter Sonia Delaunay. After engaging in buy and exhibit the work of Impressionists and Cubists, he began to devote much of his energy and his fortune to the painters "naive" or naïve, who preferred to call "modern primitives" and also called "painters Sacred Heart "in the first exhibition devoted to them in Paris in 1929, with works by Henri Rousseau, Seraphine de Senlis, Camille Bombois, Louis Vivin, André Bauchant ...
More: Biography of Wilhelm Uhde (Fellow guests)
[3]-His technique completely particular, was the use of paint-the most common Ripolin market, mixed with wax candles that took her in the church cemetery excavated soil and other areas of his own blood, which drew its wounds and gave life to your pictures ... [4]-Seraphine began painting, he said, an indication of the angels and the Virgin. When leaving the privacy of your room going to talk and hug the trees and flowers.
[5]-Seraphine Louis, who was born the same year as Camille Claudel, lived his last years as a sculptor, who only survived him one year, committed to a mental asylum. He died on December 11, 1942, at age 78, in an annex to the hospital at Villers-sous-Erquery due to massive doses of tranquilizers, physical deprivation and lack of food during the German occupation of France in World War II and were fatal to the thousands of men and women living in psychiatric facilities. She was buried in a mass grave. 
('s house in Senlis Seraphine Louis)
In 1912 Wilhelm Uhde [2] moved to Senlis to rest in the peace of the old town of the Ile de France, near Paris and at the same time, away from the hubbub. Every morning came a woman to clean the house. Uhde barely noticed it. One day he saw in a house in Senlis a still life of apples that caught his attention. Asked the painter's name. << ¡Es su asistenta Séraphine!>> So far fate had guided the blind. Now that could take care of the static Uhde bouquets grow to become mighty trees
in fantasy. (...) Uhde says Séraphine kept strictly secret of his painting. No one could look as she painted, when mixing colors and preparing the canvas for all took place with perfect craftsmanship. [3] He lived a monastic retreat in his little room, whose fire always burned on an eternal light to the Virgin. [4]
Small, worn with dark burning eyes and her pale face, painted in a kind of trance, mystical gardener, the flamboyant bouquets behind which is hidden temptation of all that is holy. Intercourse with fruit plants surrounded by tabs, ornaments made of sumptuous foliaceous delicately colored feathers, in which nerve glowing eyes open. Mesh strange rustling and lascivious branches with strings of pearls consisting of berry bush tenderness and starry umbels garden of pleasures. (...)
(...) All the lights and the embers of his dreams went out one day. Then he wandered from house to house and preached to the world. His spirit had been empty and unbalanced. In 1934 he died in a nursing home in Clermont. [5]
To Séraphine art was a revelation. For her painting "As for Van Gogh was an act of affection. It was as if redeemed by the act of creation. With eyes open immensely walking blindly through the uniform monotony of his little life.
Light and tragedy
Seraphine de Senlis
October 27, 2008 Senlis (Arsy, 1864 - Villers-sous-Erquery, 1942). What tragic fate ...
his [.. ]
Seraphine was a poor woman, orphaned, uneducated maid who painted alone, blindly, in an infinite solitude. Until I discovered a great dealer, collector and man of sensibility, Wilhelm Uhde, the man who won for her a place in art history. Before she plunges into the bottomless pit of insanity.
His work was not completely unknown. There are things about him at MoMA New York, for many years. In his day he published a biography of reference (Alain Vircondelet, Seraphine de Senlis, 1986). Suddenly, this fall, the Musée Maillol a major retrospective devoted to it, published a new biography (Francoise Cloarec, Seraphine - La vie reve de Seraphine de Senlis, 2008), even opens with some success a film dedicated to his life relations with Wilhelm Uhde, and his tragic end in a psychiatric asylum.
The flaneur who discovers by chance his works mysterious, disturbing, at times, a rare beauty, very powerful, questions his place in art history: that of a very pure light, shining in the firmament of dead stars.
Seraphine Louis (1864-1942) represents a unique case in the history of painting. Completely self-taught, Seraphine began painting at age 42 because "heard a voice asked him." As old-fashioned, it was itself based paint mixing land, pigments and all kinds of products that always kept a jealous secret. Orphaned at age seven, was raised by his sister. She worked cleaning houses of the bourgeoisie and began to paint flowers, plants and trees in a completely personal. Séraphine not seem to get influenced by other painters, but it shows how unique.
seraphine-louis in 1920 Séraphine Her ob ra
was released thanks to his early paintings, still lifes small, accidentally fall into the hands of a German collector Wilhelm Uhde, a friend of Braque and Picasso, the house cleaned. Unfortunately
Séraphine who leads a life mired in poverty, gradually falls into madness, and is committed by "chronic psychosis" in the psychiatric hospital where he continues painting Clermont.
dies December 11, 1942 with 78 years of age at the hospital at Villers-sous-Erquery under the harsh conditions of the asylums in France under Nazi occupation, was buried in a mass grave. Seraphin
Louis, there are 70 to 80 frames scattered over the Maillol Museum, the Art Museum in Nice and naive art museum Senlis. 