The Unknown Night: The Madness and Genius of R. A. Blakelock, an American Painter

On February 22, 1916, Ralph Albert Blakelock's haunting landscape Brook by Moonlight was sold at auction for $20,000, a record price for a painting by a living American artist. The sale, his second record price in three years, made him famous. The newspapers called him America's greatest artist, and thousands flocked to exhibitions of his work. Yet at the time of his triumph, Blakelock was confined for fifteen years in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York while his wife and children lived in poverty. Released from the asylum by a young philanthropist, Blakelock was about to become the victim of one of the most heartless con games of the century. This remarkable biography -- unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and authority -- chronicles the life, times, and madness of one of America's most celebrated and exploited painters, whose brooding, hallucinogenic landscapes anticipated abstract expressionism by more than half a century. With unfaltering historical detective work, Glyn Vincent unearths the facts of Blakelock's childhood in Greenwich Village; his youthful journeys among the Sioux and Uinta Indians, which inspired some of his best-known paintings; and the years in which he struggled to support his family by peddling his canvases door-to-door and playing piano in vaudeville theaters. He explores the nature of Blakelock's mental illness and shows how the painter fell into the dubious care of a dashing adventuress who kept him a virtual prisoner while siphoning off the profits of his success, and he assesses the painter's true place in the pantheon of American art. Like the best biographies, this book is also a portrait of a vanished world, and particularly the New York of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a city of artists' studios and spiritualists' salons, shantytowns and millionaires' mansions, a city where the line between obscurity and adulation was seductively, treacherously thin. Impressively researched, filled with human drama and vivid period detail, and in the tradition of A Beautiful Mind and The Professor and the Madman, The Unknown Night is a seductive mixture of scholarship and storytelling.