The Monomaniac of Envy

c. 1819–22

Oil on canvas, 72 × 58 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

An elderly woman in a white cap stares sideways with red-rimmed eyes and a tight mouth. Her name and story are unknown; only the painter's close attention survives.

One of five surviving portraits of mentally ill sitters; the museum treats the story of a doctor's commission as unproven.
Look at the eyes, which avoid ours and fix on something outside the frame.
Painted close up against a plain dark ground, with no setting or props to explain her.
Mental illness becomes a subject for portraiture. The sitter is studied as an individual, not a curiosity, in the years when doctors in Paris were beginning to classify madness.
The Lyon museum bought it in 1908 at the sale of the collector Auguste Chéramy.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)