The Unknown Night

"In the early 1900s Ralph Albert Blakelock's mysterious paintings were as sought after as the works of such American masters as Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. In 1916, his 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 Blakelock famous. The newspapers called him America's greatest artist; thousands flocked to exhibits of his work. Yet at the time of his triumph Blakelock had spent fifteen years confined in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New…