Henry Darger

I quite by accident stumbled across the work of Henry Darger whilst leafing through a magazine at Hotel Costes in Paris. The image above is the torn out page from the magazine, which I swiftly deposited into my bag, my understanding of the French language being non existent, I had to find out about this artist.

As soon as I Googled Henry Darger I couldn’t have come across a more heartbreaking yet fascinating story.  And of course hundreds more images as wonderful as the first that originally drew me in to his world.

He spent a solitary existence, yet within the walls of a rented, second floor room in Chicago he created a world of his own in which he would paint and write about The Vivian Girls. The sadness for me is that his work lay undiscovered until his death in 1900.  But Mr Darger, what a legacy.