Born in Lafayette, Alabama, Gertrude Morgan was inspired to paint from religious conviction after what she described as a "divine visitation" in her kitchen in 1934. She, with only a third-grade education, then left her family and at age 37, became an evangelist. Two years later, she settled in New Orleans where she became a street preacher of the gospel for a fundamentalist sect.

She started an orphanage and built a small church. Inspired by what she called the "divine word," she dressed in and surrounded herself with items of white, a mode of dress until her death when she was age 80. In keeping with this appearance, she asserted that she had been instructed to become the bride of Christ.

After 1965, when her orphanage was...