Automatic drawing by Madame Favre Circa 1860 Courtesy of the Henry Boxer Gallery

Little is known about this mysterious artist. An exercise book entitled The Natural Talent of Madame Favre from 1858-60 containing a number of her ethereal drawings was discovered in the 1970s in a French spiritualist library. The artist and her work have remained an enigma ever since that discovery. Each of her drawings depicts one or more heads, male or female, with cascades of hair billowing around the porcelain looking faces. All the works are pencil on paper and some bear the stamp ‘Favre’ along with the year they were created. Occasionally they have been known to turn up in auction houses in Europe and her work is exhibited regularly, most recently at The Medium’s Medium at Frieze Art Fair in London by The Gallery of Everything in 2019 and at The College of Psychic Studies in London as part of their Visions of Wonder Exhibition in 2019.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Henry Boxer Gallery in London, The Collection De L’Art Brut, Lausanne, The Museum of Everything and the ABCD Collection in Paris.

See our pages devoted to Fernand Desmoulin and Marguerite Burnat Provins for similar mediumistic artists to Favre.