Born in London on May 8th, 1905, Aimée Seyfort received almost all her professional training in art in the studios and free academies of Paris, where her family settled when she was a child, and in Dresden.
After initially exploring several other well-known Parisian art academies, she found at La Grande Chaumière, a studio in which Charles Guérin (himself a pupil of Gustave Moreau and subsequently a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, 1875 - 1939) was teaching.
Describing Guérin as a Colourist, she felt that she owed him much as her first true teacher and guide in painting; to vibrancy and intensity of colour she has indeed attached primary importance in the greater part of her work.
Later she moved to the school run in Paris by the prominent Russian painter, Vasily Ivanovich Shukaev (1887 - 1973) together with his close friend and colleague Alexandre Evgenyevich Yakovlev (later head of the Department of Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston until the year before his death, 1887 - 1938); both these artists were reputed and appreciated Neo-classicists.
To them she has felt indebted for the importance their teaching and example placed on drawing and structure. She was in addition interested in the remarkable ethnographical records made by Iacovleff when on the Citroën expeditions first in Africa (1925) and then in Central and East Asia (1931).
When still very young, Aimée Seyfort was given her own studio at the Foyer féminin de France in the Montparnasse area of Paris, where she executed her earliest work.
For several years she also explored stage designing for opera (Pergolesi's La serva padrona) and theatre (for Louis Jouvet); but she decided not to continue long in this line.
She worked mainly at home, in her studio, where she also taught some advanced students. Her earlier exhibitions were held in Paris and Amsterdam. Later she exhibited in New York, at the Brooklyn Museum, the Roerich Museum, the American-British Art Centre, and the E. Weyhe Gallery.
When in New Mexico she had exhibitions at the Santa Fé Art Museum and at the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
In Santa Fé too she collaborated on a project initiated by Mary Cabot Wheelwright at the then Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (now the Wheelwright Museum of American Indian Art) to record and preserve for posterity the ritual sand paintings of the Navajo people.
Chiefly, however, she worked in the Paris region and in South and North India including the Himalayas.
Aimée Seyfort died in January 2001. Her last exhibition was at the Rossi and Rossi Gallery, Jermyn Street, London, in September 2001.
