Ghost Dance: A Picture of a Madman

In February of 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 Middletown, New York and his wife and children were living in poverty in a ramshackle cabin in Leeds. While Blakelock's early works were heavily influenced by Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School painters, the onset of schizophrenia pushed his paintings into ever more controversial and radical areas.