Born 1909, Chicago, Illinois, USA; died 1992, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Amateur sculptor and published photographer who illustrated, fashioned and immortalised his strange family of secret pre-teen mannequins.

Born 1907 near Stapleton, Nebraska, USA; died 1986, Callaway, Nebraska, USA

Bearded son of Eastern European stock, whose Healing Machine of hand-turned wirework channelled the earth’s energy at his dilapidated farmhouse, but never transmitted the immortality he craved.

Born 1886, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland; died 1964, Gimel, Switzerland

Swiss governess whose entirely imaginary affair with Kaiser Wilhelm II sparked a sensual and allegedly schizophrenic oeuvre of poetic drawings, paintings, collages and murals.

Born 1892, Chicago, Illinois, USA; where he died in 1973

Devout hermit and legendary illustrator whose secret sequential panoramas reveal how his self-penned lifetime fairytale fictionalised a sad troubled childhood.

Born 1874, Davidson County, Tennessee, USA; died 1951, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Posthumously acclaimed limestone carver, whose tombstone engravings and earthbound visions led him to be the first African-American with a one-person exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1937.

Born 1942, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, Republic of China; where she died in 2010

Arthritic housewife and retired factory worker whose daily practice of Qigong (a form of traditional Chinese medicine) inspired visions of health and spirituality, ethereal energy drawings that anticipated her own demise.

Born 1876, Saint-Pierre-les-Auchel, France; died 1954, Burbure, France

Bearded former miner guided by spirit voices, whose monumental pointillistic paintings are littered with mystical references and hidden sexual innuendos.

Born 1924, Mologa, Yaroslavl, USSR; 1937 to Afonino, Yaroslavl, USSR (now Russia); where he died in 2003

Silent self-taught draughtsman, whose figurative self-absorption recasts him as a heroic hunter, revolutionary fighter, conceptual photographer and artist.

Born 1835, Bramber, England; where he died in 1918

The acclaimed master of Victorian taxidermy whose lifetime’s journey was a tiny West Sussex museum, filled with dioramas of deceased woodland creatures in his brilliantly imagined schools, gentlemen’s clubs, nursery rhymes and fantasies.

Born 1931, La Maltournée, near Orléans, France; 1950 to Fleury-les-Aubrais, France; where he still lives

Aesthetic gun-runner and Dubuffet discovery (and keen correspondent) whose daily astronautical and ammunitional devices now encompass gigantic forms of his original modest dimensionality.

Born 1943, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA; 1985 to Dutch Flat, California, USA; where she died in 2005

Late-blooming non-verbal maker whose emotive assemblies of wool, yarn and thread came to be only when her twin sister rescued her from institutionalisation.

Born 1962, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA; lives in Waynesville, North Carolina, USA

Contemporary Southern-fried artist, whose photographic memory and numerical literacy are revealed on expansive disaster-strewn paper-napkin tableaux.

Born 1916, San Giovanni Lupatoto, near Verona, Italy; died 1974, Verona, Italy

Italian serviceman whose profound battle scars found relief in the thousands of text-framed drawings which told a life-story from the farm to the frontline.

Born 1803, Freistadt, Austria; died 1887, Eferding, Austria

Inspired by the encyclopaedic disseminations of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, this hermit-like Germanic illustrator fictionalised flora and fauna with such theatrical flair that he effectively pre-dated the Surrealists.