Soutter's biography is marked by discontinuity, change, disruption, and extreme circumstances. Unrecognized during his lifetime and working in artistic isolation, he is now considered one of the most important representatives of Art Brut, a term first coined by Jean Dubuffet in 1945. With his radical and deeply subjective imagery, his oeuvre was initially only recognized and supported by a few people during his lifetime, among them his cousin Le Corbusier and the writer Jean Giono. Only recently has he been celebrated as a spectacular discovery by posterity. Soutter's tragic life is a compelling and disturbing testimony to the failure of bourgeois conventions. Born the second child to a pharmacist father and a musician mother, the artist was soon considered an eccentric: he first studied engineering, then switched to architecture, which he completed, only to devote himself to the violin. Nevertheless, Soutter soon gave up his study of music to attend various art and painting classes, first in Lausanne and then in Paris. In 1897, he emigrated to Colorado Springs with the violinist Magde Fursman, who would soon become his wife. There, he became head of the newly founded Art Department at Colorado College. However, this apparent stability in Soutter's life was short-lived and soon ended in a break. It is a story of both private and professional failure in the making. He divorced his wife in 1903 and resigned from the college's board of trustees. Soutter returned to Switzerland as a broken man and barely managed to keep his head above water by taking on odd jobs, living beyond his means, and at the expense of his family. Soutter was eventually placed under the legal guardianship of his family and was admitted to a Swiss nursing home in 1923. Soutter spent nineteen years until he died in the authoritarian institution in Ballaigues, where he brought his very own artistic world to life in the seclusion of his chamber. The intensity of the later finger paintings, which have a surface appeal directly from the artist's soul, is almost physical. “Personnage nimbé et assis” places a figure in the foreground modeled on Christian depictions of the Pietà. It is coarse, reduced, shadowy, and, at the same time, full of emotional intensity. The figure, crowned with the rays of a halo, refers to a central metaphor in Soutter's work: Christ as a symbol of pain, suffering, and redemption, closely linked to Soutter's biography, characterized by isolation and inner struggle. In the late 1930s, Soutter developed the radical finger painting technique that made his work so unique at the time. His hands became a tool for direct emotional expression, part of this intense physical creative process, which is transferred to paper in impetuous yet precise lines, full of tension and emotion. His figures look like visionary apparitions, drawn in a frenzy of energy with a powerful impact on the viewer. [KT]