Glyn Vincent

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 made him famous, newspapers called him America's greatest artist, and thousands flocked to exhibits of his work. Yet at the time of his triumph Blakelock had spent 15 years confined in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York and his wife and children were living...