''Portrait of a Kleptomaniac'' or ''Portrait of an Insane Person'' ( or ) is an 1822 oil painting by

Théodore Géricault Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (; 26 September 1791 – 26 January 1824) was a French Painting, painter and Lithography, lithographer, whose best-known painting is ''The Raft of the Medusa''. Although he died young, he was one of the pi ...

. It is part of series of ten portraits made for the

psychiatrist A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are physicians and evaluate patients to determine whether their sy ...

Étienne-Jean Georget and is currently kept in the

Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent The Museum of Fine Arts ( nl, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, MSK) an art museum in Ghent, Belgium, is situated at the East side of the Citadelpark (near the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst). The museum's collection consists of some 9000 artwor ...

, Belgium.

Background

The painting belongs to a series of ten portraits of the insane inmates of Salpêtrière asylum in Paris.Bárbara Eschenburg e Ingeborg Güssow, «El Romanticismo y el Realismo », in ''Los maestros de la pintura occidental'', Taschen, 2005, p 427 () Géricault made it near the end of his career and the five remaining portraits from the series represent the painter's last triumph. Psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget, one of the founders of social psychiatry, asked Géricault to do these paintings which would represent each of the clinical models of the disease. Georget believed that dementia was a modern disease, which depended in large part on social progress in industrialized countries. He believed that those who were mentally ill needed help. Instead of bringing the ill persons into a classroom to examine their physical characteristics, the doctor instructed Géricault to paint models representing different types of madness. Georget appreciated the objectivity in this series of works that established a link between romantic art and empirical science.

Description

The work was made quickly, which prefigured the concerns of the Impressionists. However, the painting did not belong to

Impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passa ...

. At the time, to give dignity to those who were mentally ill was new: they were generally excluded from society, and the previous works represented madmen as possessed creatures or ludicrous people, according to a medieval belief. Géricault tried to show objectively the patient's face: the empty gaze of the kleptomaniac goes to infinity and his face is rigid, with a neglected beard and dirty neck. The paintings are noteworthy for their bravura style, expressive realism, and for their documenting of the psychological discomfort of individuals, made all the more poignant by the history of insanity in Géricault's family, as well as the artist's own fragile mental health.Patrick Noon: ''Crossing the Channel'', page 162. Tate Publishing, 2003.

References

External links

{{Gericault 1822 paintings Paintings by Théodore Géricault Paintings in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent