Insane Woman

Around 1820, a young Paris doctor named Étienne-Jean Georget was arguing something new: that madness was an illness you could read on a face, not a moral failing or a punishment. He asked Géricault to paint ten of his patients at the Salpêtrière asylum, each fixed on a single obsession. This woman was labelled with envy. Géricault gives her no chains and no wild gesture, none of the theatre earlier painters used for the mad. She simply sits, eyes reddened and turned aside, her cap slightly askew, painted with the same steady attention he would give a portrait of a banker. Five of the ten survive, scattered across Europe. This one stayed in Lyon.