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Around 1820, the French artist Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) painted ten portraits of people who had been committed to asylums. Five of them remain extant. Géricault’s portraits seem to mirror the then common belief that mental illness was detectable in the facial features of the insane. Unlike many other portraits and drawings of that time, however, they were not just a mere registration of objects. Instead, they were dignified images of real people, surpassing the objectiveness of the studied patient. This contribution studies the origins and context of these portraits and examines how they relate to contemporary theories about psychiatric patients.