| Insane Woman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Théodore Géricault |
| Year | 1822 |
| Type | Oil painting |
| Location | Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon |
Insane Woman aka Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (French: La Folle Monomane de l'envie) is an 1822 oil-on-canvas painting by the French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault in a series of work Géricault did on the mentally ill. It is housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France.
Mental aberration and irrational states of mind interested artists against Enlightenment rationality. Géricault, like many of his contemporaries, examined the influence of mental states on the human face and shared the belief, common in his time, that a face more accurately revealed character, especially in madness and at the moment of death. He made many studies of the inmates in hospitals and institutions for the criminally insane, and he studied the heads of guillotine victims.
Géricault's Insane Woman, her mouth tense, her eyes red-rimmed with suffering, is one of several portraits he made of the mentally ill. These portraits present the physical facts with authenticity, especially in contrast to earlier idealized commissioned portraiture.[1]
References
- ^ "Théodore Géricault, La Monomane de l'envie, dit aussi La Hyène de la Salpêtrière" (in French). Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Archived from the original on 22 July 2011. Retrieved 19 March 2010.
External links
- Géricault, Théodore (1819–1822), La monomane de l'envie. Collections du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France
Media related to La Folle, ou la Monomane de l'envie at Wikimedia Commons
This page was last edited on 27 October 2023, at 18:27