Henry Darger

1892-1973 · Chicago, USA

A Chicago hospital janitor who went home every night to a rented room and wrote the longest known work of fiction in history, illustrated with watercolour battle scenes metres wide. Nobody knew.

The life

Orphaned young and institutionalised as a child, Darger escaped as a teenager and walked back to Chicago, where he spent his whole working life scrubbing floors in Catholic hospitals. He attended Mass daily, kept a ten-year weather journal, and in private wrote In the Realms of the Unreal, a 15,000 page epic about seven angelic sisters leading a rebellion against child-enslaving generals. His landlords found the whole archive as he lay dying in 1973. He is now the most famous outsider artist in the world.

The work

Panoramic watercolour scrolls, some double sided and three metres long, composed by tracing and collaging figures from comics, colouring books and adverts into dreamlike, often violent battle scenes. The innocence of the source material and the ferocity of the story give the work its unresolvable charge. Major holdings sit in the American Folk Art Museum in New York and Intuit in Chicago, which preserves his room.

Why we love them

The ultimate proof that an artist needs no audience at all. He made a universe in one room, and the rent was the only review.

Go deeper

• Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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