All the art you’d pay not to own

‘To my mind,’ Renoir once wrote, ‘a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is.’ What would he have made of Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Gallery? Of the 100-plus artworks it examines, few are cheerful and fewer pretty. Often you turn the pages of an art book wondering which painting you most covet, but with this one it’s more a question of which you’d pay not to own: the 13th-century ‘Penis tree’ maybe? The 90 cans of excrement sealed up by Piero Manzoni in 1961 and now selling for up to €275,000 apiece? Or, most repellent, the ‘Portrait of Barbara van Beck’(c.1640), her whole face sprouting thick, luxuriant hair?

Brooke-Hitching has a taste for the imaginary, the eccentric and sometimes the completely erased. His book Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (2015) revisited some of the oddest competitive games man has devised.