Homage to the great Henry Darger.

 Henry Darger was a loner come artist that  saw no  fame while living.   l consider his work honest, sensitive and above all superb.  Homage to the great Henry Darger. There is so much depth, pain and beauty in his work.  "What happened to you Henry to have these images in your mind" ? l feel honored and very lucky to have found him. l recently discovered his work through a close friend that is also an artist (L. T.) and a fabulous one at that.  A person well before his time.  PROTECTOR OF CHILDREN is what is written on his grave stone. 

At the time of his death at age 81, Henry Darger left behind a 15,000-page novel, an eight-volume autobiography, and hundreds of paintings, yet surprisingly little was known about him while he was alive.

A close-up from one of three known photographs of Darger.

Henry Darger was born in Chicago in 1892. Just before his fourth birthday, his mother died from an infection incurred after the birth of a baby girl who was presumably given up for adoption. He lived with his father, a tailor, until 1900, when he was placed in The Mission of Our Lady of Mercy, a Catholic institution for young boys. Darger attended a public school during this period, and was apparently highly intelligent with a particular interest in the Civil War. But after evincing signs of behavioral problems and on the recommendation of several medical evaluations, he was sent to live in the Lincoln Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois. The asylum housed 1,500 children, many of whom were severely developmentally disabled, and there is no doubt that he received only a rudimentary education during the years that he lived there. After his father died in 1905, Darger made several attempts to escape from the asylum, and in 1909 at age 17, he succeeded. He returned to Chicago for the remainder of his life and worked in various hospitals.

The Mission of Our Lady of Mercy

Darger lived a solitary life and attended several masses each day at a Catholic church near his home. In 1930, he rented a single large room he inhabited until he became too weak to climb the stairs. He went to live in the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Elderly, coincidentally, the same home where his father had died years before. Shortly after Darger left his apartment, his landlord Nathan Lerner discovered the hand-bound volumes of Darger's literary and artistic works among the clutter Darger had accumulated over the years. Within six months of leaving his apartment and one day after his 81st birthday, Henry Darger died.