Portraits of the Insane

Theodore Gericault and the Subject of Psychotherapy

Robert Snell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367103255
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429917400
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

In the early 1820s, in the gloomy aftermath of the 1789 Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the French Romantic painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) made five portraits of patients in an asylum or clinic. No depictions of madness before or since can compare with them for humanity, straightforwardness and immediacy.  The portraits challenge us to find responses in ourselves to the face and the embodied mysteries of the other person, and to our own internal (unsconscious, disavowed) otherness: in this sense, Gericault was a "painter-analyst". The challenge could not be more urgent, in our world of suspicion of the stranger, and of the medicalisation of madness. The book sketches the history of this last process, from the Enlightenment through to the Revolution and its public health policies, to the birth of the asylum in its interface with the penal system. But there was also a new medico-philosophical conviction that the mad were never wholly mad, and their suffering and disturbance might best be addressed through relationship and speech.

Chapter One
Illustrations

This chapter gathers together twenty of the images discussed in the book: ten paintings and a sheet of drawings by Théodore Géricault, a painting by Jacques-Louis David and another formerly attributed to him, a painting by Eugène Delacroix, a lithograph after a painting by Horace Vernet, three engraved book illustrations, by Ambroise Tardieu, including one made after a drawing by Georges François Marie Gabriel, a drawing by this same Gabriel, and a plate from a book by Charles Bell. The reader might care to linger on these for a while, in as open-minded and free-associative a way as possible, before reading on.

Illustration 1. Théodore Géricault. Monomane du vol d’enfants (Monomaniac of Child Abduction). c.1822–1823. Oil on canvas. 86.8 × 54 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA.

Illustration 2. Théodore Géricault. Monomane du comandement militaire (Monomaniac of Military Command). c.1822–1823. Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm. Collection Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Illustration 3. Théodore Géricault. Monomane du vol (Monomaniac of Theft). c.1822–1823. Oil on canvas. 61.2 × 50.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium.

Illustration 4. Théodore Géricault. Monomane du jeu (Monomaniac of Gambling). c.1822–1823. Oil on canvas. 77 × 64 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Illustration 5. Théodore Géricault. Monomane de l’envie (Monomaniac of Envy). c.1822–1823. Oil on canvas. 72 × 58 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France.

Illustration 6. Théodore Géricault. Chasseur de la Garde. 1812. Oil on canvas. 349 × 266 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Illustration 7. Jacques-Louis David. The Oath of the Horatii. 1784. Oil on canvas. 329.8 × 424.8 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Illustration 8. Théodore Géricault. The Race of the Barbieri Horses. c.1817. Oil on paper marouflé on canvas. 44.5 × 59.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Illustration 9. Théodore Géricault. The Raft of the Medusa. 1819. Oil on canvas. 491 × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Illustration 10. Théodore Géricault. Expressive Self-portraits as Sailor. c.1818–1819. Graphite, pen, and brown ink on brown paper. 21 × 26.2 cm. Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.

Illustration 11. Théodore Géricault. Guillotined Heads. c.1818–1820. Oil on canvas. 50 × 61 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Illustration 12. Théodore Géricault. Mazeppa. 1823. Oil on canvas. 28.5 × 21.5 cm. Private collection.

Illustration 13. Charles Motte, after Horace Vernet. La folle par amour. 1819. Lithograph. Plate XXVI, volume 1, Galerie lithographiée de son Altesse royale Monseigneur le Duc d’ Orléans. Paris: Bureau de la Galerie, 1830[?].

Illustration 14. Ambroise Tardieu. Aba. Idiot. Plate XXII from J.-E.-D. Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, 1838.

Illustration 15. Ambroise Tardieu, after Georges François Marie Gabriel. Démonomaniaque. Plate VI from J.-E.-D. Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, 1838.

Illustration 16. Anon. The Maniac. Plate from C. Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, 1806.

Illustration 17. Georges François Marie Gabriel. Officier, devenu fou, par opinion politique. 1813. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Illustration 18. Ambroise Tardieu. Manie. Plate VIII from J.-E.-D. Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, 1838.

Illustration 19. French School, formerly attributed to J.-L. David. Half-Length Portrait of a Woman known as La Maraîchère (The Market Gardener). c.1795. Oil on canvas. 82 × 65 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France.

Illustration 20. Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Oil on canvas....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Illustrations
• CHAPTER TWO The canvases unrolled
• CHAPTER THREE Géricault, a biographical sketch
• CHAPTER FOUR Madness in modernity, 1656–1789
• CHAPTER FIVE The Revolution, Cabanis, Pinel, the asylum
• CHAPTER SIX A new account of the human: responses to Pinel’s Traité
• CHAPTER SEVEN The Golden Age of alienism
• CHAPTER EIGHT Géricault and the alienists
• CHAPTER NINE History painter
• CHAPTER TEN Surplus and the limits of interpretation
• SOME CONCLUSIONS
• REFERENCES
• INDEX