Séraphine was born in France at Assy, where she spent her youth tending farm animals. Later, she became a domestic servant in the town of Senlis. The German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde first noticed her paintings in 1912 but did not actively encourage her until after the First World War. He helped her by providing art supplies and, especially, the very large canvases she craved for her wildly-colored images of floral and plant arrangements. Always a little eccentric, her religious zeal and paranoiac work habits gradually developed into a full-scale psychosis. She died in the insane asylum at Clermont.