An artist's life

About this book

An artist's life by Harry Harrison is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It centers on art and perception, following a painter whose hunt for an authentically “alien” vision exposes a concealed extraterrestrial presence operating on Earth.

The story follows Brent Dalgreen, a famed artist weakened and dying from radiation after a year painting on the Moon. At the Metropolitan Museum he detects an unsettling, nonhuman sensibility in an autumn landscape by Arthur Di Costa, then meets Di Costa and his wife, noticing the same uncanny slant in a portrait and suspecting an inhuman perspective behind it. Shadowing Di Costa, Brent witnesses a cryptic note trigger a trance and follows him to a hidden underground office, where a powerful telepathic administrator reveals the truth: Earth is used as a covert sanitarium by an advanced alien civilization, and Di Costa—recreated in human form—is a congenitally feeble-minded “outpatient” whose early alien impressions seep into his paintings. When Brent tries to resist, the director subdues him and decides to “dispose” of the risk humanely by relocating him—after curing his radiation damage—to another sanitarium world with a chlorine atmosphere, leaving him unconscious but oddly hopeful about the new colors he might paint there.