Sometime between 1901 and 1903, the Mother had been introduced by Louis Themanlys, a friend of her brother Matteo, to the teaching of the Polish occultist Max Theon. Her solitary inner exploration received a decisive stimulus from contact with a well-formulated system founded on ancient esoteric traditions. She joined Theon's organisation in Paris and became active in the editing and publication of his monthly Revue Cosmique .
             Theon himself lived in nemcen, Algeria. His wife, an Englishwoman, was a gifted clairvoyant whose occult experiences formed much of the content of the Revue Cosmique .The Mother corresponded with them and met Theon in Paris in 1905. In the summer of 1906 and again the following summer, she journeyed to Tlemcen to study for a few months with Theon and his wife. Theon had a large and beautiful estate which "spread across the hillside overlooking the whole valley of Tlemcen". The Mother did some paintings of his house and garden . She also drew his portrait.
             It may have been in the summer of 1905 that the Mother had an experience in the garden of some friends with whom she was staying. It was near the sea. This makes it almost certain that the friends were Themanlys and his wife, who had some property in Courseulles, Normandy, on the English Channel near Caen. The Mother is known to have stayed with Themanlys in the summer of 1905, because Theon wrote to her in Courseulles in July of that year. For months she had been working hard to overcome a hiatus between two planes of her inner conscious- ness. An undeveloped link at a certain point was blocking a whole range of experiences from easily reaching her outer awareness. All her efforts had produced no apparent resultl but still she persisted:
              It was at the end of July or the beginning of August. I left Paris, the house I was staying in, and went to the countryside, quite a small place on the   seashore, to stay with some friends who had a garden. Now, in that garden was a lawn. ..where there were flowers and around it some trees. It was a pretty place, very quiet, very silent. I lay on the grass, like this, flat on my stomach, my elbows in the grass, and then suddenly all the life of that Nature, all the life of that region between the subtle physical and the most material vital, which is very living in plants and in Nature, all that region became all at once, suddenly, without any transition, absolutely living, intense, conscious, marvellous. And it was the result of six months of work which had given nothing. I had not noticed anything, but just a little condition like that and the result was there!
      It is tempting to connect this experience with the Mother's reported comment on the painting . An Ashram artist recalls: "It was about this painting that the Mother said that once when she was meditating in this garden she had the experience of identity with the earth." The experience is not described in exactly the same terms, but there is the common element of the garden. "Identity with the earth" might be a simplification of an experience whose precise description ("a region between the subtle physical and the most material vital") is a little esoteric. It should be noted that the painting does not attempt to express the experience in question, but is simply a painting of the garden in which the experience took place.
     Madame Theon died unexpectedly in September 1908 and the Revue Cosmique came to an end three months later. The Mother had already met Paul Richard, who joined the Groupe Cosmique after a stay with Theon early in 1907. In a few years Richard would take her to India to meet Sri Aurobindo. From the time of her divorce from Henri Morisset or a little before, the Mother's close involvement with art and artists can be seen as giving way to new preoccupations. Yet the essence of the artistic impulse remained an inalienable part of her consciousness. The quest for the perfect expression of beauty did not cease, but assumed a higher and larger form. As she said years later:
      Skill is not art, talent is not art. Art is a living harmony and beauty that must be expressed in all the movements of existence. This manifestation of beauty and harmony is part of the Divine realisation upon earth, perhaps even its greatest part.
                                     

see also

Early Art Studies

Years in the Studio

Life among Artists

Sojourn in Japan

Pondicherry
The Later Paintings and Drawings