Vera, the Medium

Vera is a fraudulent medium, and knows it — and then, at a séance staged to swindle a dying old millionaire out of his fortune, she says something she could not have known. Davis was the most famous reporter of his age and the model for the Gibson Man; he wrote this in 1908 out of the exposures of spiritualist fraud he had covered, and Vera's own doubt about herself is the sharpest thing in it. Fifty-three plates by painters including Waterhouse and Munch, their scenes of gardens, tables and ruins tracing the same hush of rooms where something unseen is at work.