Aloïse Corbaz was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1886. As a child she dreamed of becoming an opera singer, but after graduation she enrolled in a sewing school. In 1911 she traveled to Germany as a private governess, and tutored the daughters of Kaiser Wilhelm II's chaplain. During her stay in Potsdam she became deeply infatuated with the monarch, a pathological love.
In 1913, following the signs heralding the outbreak of World War I, she
was forced to return to Switzerland, where the f irst symptoms of a mental illness began to show: she immersed herself in feverish religious activity and sent love letters to the Kaiser. In 1920 she was moved to a convent that served as a psychiatric institution for the chronically ill, where she spent the rest of her life.

- The discovery -
In 1945 Jean Dubuffet visited the convent in his pursuit of works by
institutionalized untutored artists. He purchased some works by Corbaz, whom he deemed the ultimate practitioner of Art Brut, and continued visiting her from time to time.

- The work -
As a cloistered inmate, Corbaz was entrusted with ironing the nuns' habits.
In her imaginary life, she was a pope, a prophet, a lover, and an opera
singer. During the f irst years of her institutionalization she painted
clandestinely on scraps of paper, envelopes, and scraps of cardboard with
graphite, ink, crushed petals, and toothpaste. From 1936 on, encouraged by the clinic director who supplied her with paper and colored pencils, she began creating erotic paintings which ref lected her fantasies and yearnings, her love for the Kaiser and her identif ication with f igures of tragic women from the past. In the 1940s her paintings grew in scale, and became rife with symbols. Magnif icently colorful, they feature regal female f igures and historical heroines adorned with ornamental, sensual motifs, whose breasts become f lowers, and their wombs-fruit baskets.