Ralph Barton, one of the most successful artists of the 1920s, mirrored the frantic decade in which he lived. Too much easy money, four failed marriages (his wives included French composer Germaine Tailleferre, actress Carlotta Monterey, who later married Eugene O'Neill, and the future Mrs E.E. Cummings), and his own manic-depressive personality all contributed to Barton's descent into madness. Plagued by insomnia, headaches, and what he would come to call his annual spring nervous breakdown, he began to draw images with an air of the grotesque. As the glitter of the 20s gave way to the tarnished years of the Depression, before he had turned 40, Ralph Barton killed himself.