Just two days before the feast day of St Dymphna, patron saint of the insane, this week’s picture is the portrait of an inmate of a lunatic asylum by the French romantic artist Theodore Gericault. It was painted some time in the 1820s.
 
Gericault is principally famous for his enormous history painting, The Raft of the Medusa, inspired by the most notorious maritime disaster of the age. But he created many other great works of art, none more remarkable than the so-called Portraits de Fous, or “Portraits of the Insane”, done shortly before his death at the age of 33 from complications caused by a riding accident.
 
Gericault was one of the first painters of post-Enlightenment Europe to reject the centuries-old convention of depicting the mentally ill as raving monsters or buffoons – a tradition which had its origins in the superstitious notion that people exhibiting signs of instability must be possessed by evil spirits or the Devil. The unprecedented restraint and dignity of the portrait reproduced here imply a more sensitive, reasoned attitude to those suffering from disorders of the mind. The artist has taken care to leave out anything which might too loudly trumpet the presumed “madness” of his sitter. Instead of a straitjacket, or any of the other restraints in common use in asylums at the time, the man wears his own clothes, which have been abbreviated to little more than a white collar and cravat and a dark, sketchily indicated coat. Likewise, the insititution of his confinement has been reduced to nothing more than a patch of dim wall in the background. Other artists of the time (including Goya) depicted lunatic asylums as thrilling, dangerous theatres of madness. But sensationalism has no place here. Gericault is not after the frisson of the grotesque....

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