Theodore Gericault

Theodore Gericault’s “Portraits of the Insane” series is fascinating. Usually classical portraits are commissioned by high ranking nobles and the rich as they can be quite expensive. Here, Gericault has flipped the genre of portraiture and included mentally unstable people, people that usually cannot afford to have their portrait painted, people that are outcasts in society. 

The figures in the portraits seem to invite both our detachment and our engagement simultaneously. 

Portrait of a Child Snatcher, 1822, oil on canvas, 65 x 54cm.

It is an examination of suffering. He is a man who has no "right" to have a portrait made, a man utterly removed from the respectable world.

 The Woman with a Gambling Mania, 1820, oil on canvas, 77 x 64cm. 

Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy, 1822, oil on canvas, 72 x 58cm.

https://romanticportraitsblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/theodore-gericault-and-the-portraits-of-the-insane/

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/nov/04/art