Hombre con delirios de mando militar

Around 1822 Theodore Gericault painted a series of portraits of patients in a Paris asylum, and this is one of them. A doctor named Etienne-Jean Georget, an early specialist in mental illness, seems to have commissioned them, perhaps to study how particular delusions showed on the face. This man believed he held military command. He wears a tasselled cap, a cloak thrown over one shoulder and a medallion on his chest, the props of an imaginary rank, while his eyes stay fixed on nothing in the room. Georget's science treated such a fixation as a single obsession lodged in an otherwise sound mind. Of the ten portraits Gericault is said to have made, only five are known today, scattered across Europe.