The Woman with a Gambling Mania

In the years around 1820, French doctors were just beginning to argue that madness was a medical condition rather than a moral failing, and that you could read it in a face. A young alienist, Etienne-Jean Georget, believed each fixed obsession left its own mark, and he asked Gericault to paint a set of his patients from the Paris asylums. This is one of them, a woman gripped by a compulsion to gamble. Gericault gives her no props and no story, just the reddened eyes, the slack mouth and the sidelong, wary look. Five of the series survive, scattered now across different museums. They were among the last things Gericault painted before a riding accident killed him at 32.