Gericault’s The Woman with Gambling Mania c. 1822
Gericault, Theodore
The Woman with Gambling Mania
c. 1822
Oil on canvas
30 1/4 x 25 1/2 in. (77 x 65 cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
for a larger picture go to http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/gericault/gambling_mania.jpg.html
Georget and Géricault
In 1820 Etienne Jean Georget, a student of Esquirol at the Salpêtrière, published On Madness. Georget believed that the physiognomies of the insane varied according to the passions and ideas which drive them, as well as to the character of the delirium and the stage of the illness. "In general the face of the idiot is stupid, without meaning; the face of the maniac is as agitated as his spirit, sometimes distorted or cramped; the imbecile’s face is cast down and without expression; the face of the melancholic is contracted, marked by pain or extreme preoccupation; the monomaniacal king has a proud, high facial expression; the religious maniac is meek, he prayes, keeping his eyes fixed to the heaven or to the erth; the anxious patient flees, looking to the side etc." Georget was interested in capturing typical physiognomies for further study. To this end he requested his friend Théodore Géricault, one of the greatest of the French Romantic painters, to do portraits of ten patients at the Salpêtrière between 1821 and 1824. Both men died before the project was completed and the illustrations were never published, but five of these paintings representing five different psychopathologies have been preserved.
[Sander L. Gillman, Seeing the Insane; John Wiley & Sons, 1982, 84.
from the http://bms.brown.edu/HistoryofPsychiatry/Gericault.html
