The Madwoman

An old woman in a white bonnet stares off to the side, her reddened eyes unfocused, her face slack and unguarded - a portrait not of rank or beauty but of mental illness. Gericault painted her as one of a series of patients for a doctor studying 'monomania,' each fixed obsession given a human face. Now in Lyon, the Madwoman treats its sitter with startling compassion and clinical honesty, neither mocking nor sentimental - a Romantic turn toward the outcast and the suffering mind, the marginalized rendered with the dignity of serious portraiture.