Portrait of a Kleptomaniac

Background

The painting belongs to a series of ten portraits of the insane inmates of Salpêtrière asylum in Paris. Géricault made it near the end of his career and the five remaining portraits from the series represent the painter's last triumph. Psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget, one of the founders of social psychiatry, asked Géricault to do these paintings which would represent each of the clinical models of the disease. Georget believed that dementia was a modern disease, which depended in large part on social progress in industrialized countries. He believed that those who were mentally ill needed help. Instead of bringing the ill persons into a classroom to examine their physical characteristics, the doctor instructed Géricault to paint models representing different types of madness. Georget appreciated the objectivity in this series of works that established a link between romantic art and empirical science.

Other Portraits of the Insane series (Les Monomanes)