Little is known about Marie Bouttier (1839–1921), known as Madame Bouttier. She was born in Lyon, France, into a family of canut silk workers and was drafted into her father’s workshop as a silk weaver. In 1862 she married André Bouttier, a weaver himself, and gave birth to their only child, a daughter, the following year. Marie Bouttier developed a strong interest in the occult and became an active member of a group of spiritualists in Lyon led by Alphonse Bouvier, the editor of a magazine specialising in the subject. At the age of sixty, in a state of trance, she began to make automatic drawings with a pencil. Her works depict strange creatures of indistinct shape in which plant motifs intermingle and the foliage seems to turn into insects, fish, or larvae.