Henry Darger died at his Chicago home in 1973, having played out what is perhaps the strangest, most solitary episode in the history of art. He is believed to have been born in Brazil in 1892. When he was 4 he lost his mother, who died giving birth to a girl who was later given up for adoption. Henry never met this sister. Soon after, Henry was admitted to a mental institution. Henry’s diagnosis was that “his heart is not in the right place.” He never saw his father again after that. He escaped from the asylum in his teens and found his way to Chicago. He rented an apartment, after which nothing more is known about him except that he only went out to attend Mass—sometimes as often as 5 times a day—and that the only conversations he entered into with neighbors concerned the weather, a subject that obsessed him after he witnessed a town in Illinois being destroyed by a tornado in 1913. No one had any inkling of the secrets tucked away in the home studio of this unrefined, quiet individual, a studio that occupied part of his living room and kitchen.