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John Milton wrote his epic work in a house that features as the subject of the British artist, Ged Quinn. In this painting titled The Happy Garden (2003-4), the meticulously rendered piece (Quinn’s obsessive attention to detail is typical of his work) depicts 17th Century formal gardens surrounding a charming house. On closer inspection, this pastoral idyll is not what it seems (a recurrent motif of the painter’s work); the gardens are laid out to recreate the herpes, HIV and syphilis viruses, and in the middle of a little track that works its way to the forest, there sits a tiny recreation of Spandau prison, (infamous as the Nazi prison, and destroyed to prevent it becoming a neo-Nazi shrine after the death of its last and most infamous inmate, Rudolph Hess).
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