In the early 1820s, in the gloomy aftermath of the 1789 Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the French Romantic painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) made five portraits of patients in an asylum or clinic. No depictions of madness before or since can compare with them for humanity, straightforwardness and immediacy. The portraits challenge us to find responses in ourselves to the face and the embodied mysteries of the other person, and to our own internal (unsconscious, disavowed) otherness: in this sense, Gericault was a "painter-analyst". The challenge could not be more urgent, in our world of suspicion of the stranger, and of the medicalisation of madness. The book sketches the history of this last process, from the Enlightenment through to the Revolution and its public health policies, to the birth of the asylum in its interface with the penal system. But there was also a new medico-philosophical conviction that the mad were never wholly mad, and their suffering and disturbance might best be addressed through relationship and speech.

This thesis discusses the five portraits of the insane created by Theodore Géricault at some point between 1819 and his death in 1824. I approached this not as an overly biographical subject but one which allows us to gain a greater understanding of the period after the French Revolution and between the styles of Davidian classicism and Romanticism. Additionally, I placed the subject paintings among the liberalization of French psychology during this immediate period under J.-E.-D. Esquirol and Étienne-Jean Georget, for whom the portraits were supposedly painted. Much has been studied regarding the circumstances of Géricault committing supposedly ten images (five of which survive) of patients suffering from insanity, or monomania, to canvas. Several scholars have attempted to attribute the paintings to certain dates and to certain conditions from which Géricault might have suffered. Scholars have also posited that Géricault in fact might have been committed to a clinic suffering from depression and decline of mental function; in this case Géricault would have been painting fellow sufferers rather than fulfilling a commission. While these circumstances might certainly affect our viewership of these works, I focused my thesis on how the paintings may be extrapolated to a broader study. These portraits reveal much about how Géricault approached his subjects, how he disassociated himself from conventional portrayals of the insane, and how he reflected profound shifts in politics, popular culture, and artistic styles. In Raft of the Medusa, Géricault first began to explore the placement of weakness among superficially classical subject matter. But Géricault's portraits of the insane demonstrate a point in his career in which he had come to embody his full potential. My thesis demonstrates that these paintings represent a significant moment in portraiture, and certainly reveal much about Géricault himself.

'Five Portraits of the Insane' by the nineteenth century French artist Théodore Géricault are said to be all that remain of originally ten commissioned portraits of insane patients. Each painting depicts a particular mental condition, a so-called monomania including a kleptomaniac, a woman mad with envy, and a child kidnapper. Almost nothing is known about these portraits, but they raise a multitude of questions. Who are these people? In what way are they insane? What and where are the five missing madnesses? Intrigued and inspired by an absence, Tan decides to go in search of them. Pairing personal impressions with formal analysis and archival research, the essay ventures far beyond the boundaries of art history.

No one is more conscious of the faults of this work than the author. Therefore some self -criticism should be woven into this foreward. There are two possible methodologically pure solutions to this book's theme: a de scriptive catalog of the pictures couched in the language of natural science and accom panied by a clinical and psychopathological description of the patients, or a completely metaphysically based investigation of the process of pictorial composition. According to the latter, these unusual works, explained psychologically, and the exceptional circum stances on which they are based would be integrated as a playful variation of human expression into a total picture of the ego under the concept of an inborn creative urge, behind which we would then only have to discover a universal need for expression as an instinctive foundation. In brief, such an investigation would remain in the realm of phenomenologically observed existential forms, completely independent of psychiatry and aesthetics. The compromise between these two pure solutions must necessarily be piecework and must constantly defend itself against the dangers of fragmentation. We are in danger of being satisfied with pure description, the novelistic expansion of details and questions of principle; pitfalls would be very easy to avoid if we had the use of a clearly outlined method. But the problems of a new, or at least never seriously worked, field defy the methodology of every established subject.