Louis Soutter

Louis Adolphe Soutter (4 June 1871 – 20 February 1942) was a Swiss painter and graphic artist in the Art Brut style, who produced most of his work while under care in a hospice.

After that, he went to Paris and took positions in the studios of Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant at the Académie Colarossi.

He also met Artus van Briggle, a ceramicist from America, who was planning to start a business in Colorado Springs, where Fursman was from.

Van Briggle told Soutter about a new college there, with a fine arts program, and suggested there might be an opportunity to create a department of painting and drawing.

Originally he had planned to open an interior architecture studio in New York, but health problems proved to be an obstacle.

He did not contest her action, resigned from the College and, according to The Gazette-Telegraph, had left for Paris with no intention of returning.

[4] In 1906, a friend of one of his uncles, who was head of the Sonnenfels Clinic in Spiez, invited him there to work as the gardener.

[5] There, he lived off his brother, who had to support the habit for wearing fancy clothes he had picked up in America, and his drinking.

[7] During the early part of his stay there, he made sketches with pen and pencil in small school notebooks and practiced music in the chapel; sometimes giving lessons.

'[8] Soutter died in Ballaigues in 1942, weakened by his repeated refusal to eat, at the age of seventy-one, and was buried by the hospice.