Portrait of a Kleptomaniac

Around 1820 Géricault painted a series of portraits of patients in a Paris asylum, and this is one of them, a man identified only by his affliction, the compulsion to steal. He made them for Étienne-Jean Georget, a young doctor who belonged to a new circle of physicians, the alienists, who argued that madness was an illness to be studied and treated rather than a sin or a curse. Georget wanted honest records of specific conditions, and Géricault gave him that. There is no drama here, no restraint or wildness acted out. The man simply sits, unshaven, his collar dirty, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Ten such portraits were painted and five survive; this one stayed in Belgium and hangs in Ghent.