The Melancholic Man

In the winter of 1822 psychiatry was barely a science, and a young doctor named Étienne-Jean Georget wanted something new: honest portraits of the mad, faces to study rather than mock. He turned to Théodore Géricault, who had just finished the enormous Raft of the Medusa and whose own health was failing. Géricault painted ten patients from the asylums of Paris, each fixed on a single obsession — a gambler, a kleptomaniac, a woman consumed by envy. Only five of those canvases are securely known today. This melancholic man in a red robe, brow drawn tight, was found in a private collection in Ravenna in 2019 and put forward as a lost sixth. Géricault died in 1824, at 32, so the case rests entirely on the picture itself, and several specialists on his work are not persuaded the hand is his.