Lot 81 Dα

Although scarcely known in Germany, in France Séraphine Louis is considered to be one of outsider art’s most important female painters. “Painters of the Sacred Heart” is what Wilhelm Uhde called them: Le Douanier Henri Rousseau, whom he also discovered, and the other “naive” artists. First purchased by a museum in Kassel in 1928, Séraphine Louis’s paintings are now represented in a great number of museums.
The German collector and art dealer Wilhelm Uhde fell in love with the works of the French avant-garde in Paris in 1904 and dealt in works by artists such as Picasso and Braque. It is thus likely that he also served a role in mediating other German collectors’ and museums’ purchases of French art. In the countryside outside Paris, he noticed a still life by Séraphine Louis, a woman who gave expression to her religious enthusiasm through painting fruit and flowers. Uhde had already provided her with support before World War I by hiring her for his rural “pied da terre” in Senlis, and following his absence due to the war and his subsequent return, he helped her in 1928, for example, by organising a solo exhibition.
Wishing to become one with nature, Séraphine Louis composed images of flowers that stand out for their exceptional density and intensity. Flower directly presses up against flower, filling the picture plane in an “all-over” that seems to vibrate and spontaneously calls to mind sea anemones gently swaying in the water.
Our painting is from the collection of the Hamburg author Richard Möring, who published his work under the name Peter Gan: he met Wilhelm Uhde in Paris in the late 1920s and remained friends with him for the rest of Uhde’s life.