Madness in Painting: 12 Works About Troubled Minds
Madness in painting runs from Goya’s asylum to the ten portraits Gericault made for a pioneering psychiatrist. Twelve works about minds in trouble, painted across five centuries in which medicine slowly learned to look instead of lock away.
Five things to know first
One painter here spent his last decades in asylums, and painted his best known work inside one.
Ten portraits of psychiatric patients were commissioned by a doctor. Five have been lost for 150 years.
One inscription on a world famous painting reads: could only have been painted by a madman.
One canvas shows the exact moment psychiatry began unchaining its patients.
These paintings track a change: madness went from spectacle to subject.
1 | The Madhouse, Francisco Goya (about 1815)
A stone vault full of men abandoned by their families and their century, painted from Goya’s memory of the Zaragoza asylum.
Goya painted it after his own devastating illness left him deaf, and the fear of losing his mind runs through his late work. His story is in my guide to Francisco Goya.
2 | The Monomaniacs, Theodore Gericault (about 1822)
Ten portraits of psychiatric patients, painted for Dr Etienne Georget of the Salpetriere: a woman obsessed with envy, a man convinced of his military rank, a compulsive gambler.
No mockery, no moral, just faces. Five of the ten have been lost since the 1860s. The painter of the Medusa raft made these in his last years: Theodore Gericault.
3 | The Scream and its inscription, Edvard Munch (1893)
In the sky of the first Scream, a pencil line reads: could only have been painted by a madman. In 2021 the National Museum of Norway confirmed the writing is Munch’s own.
He wrote it after hearing a student question his sanity at an early showing. The full story of the painting is in why Munch painted The Scream.
4 | The asylum year of Vincent van Gogh (1889 to 1890)
Van Gogh committed himself to the Saint Paul asylum at Saint Remy in May 1889 and painted about 150 canvases there, including The Starry Night, between crises.
His diagnosis is still debated: epilepsy, bipolar disorder and other conditions have all been proposed. The night that sent him there is in why Van Gogh cut off his ear, and his final weeks in The Last Day of Vincent van Gogh.
5 | Mad Meg, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)
A giantess in armor strides toward the mouth of hell with a sword and a basket of loot, leading an army of looting women. Flemish proverb made apocalypse.
Dulle Griet is folk madness, fury rather than illness. The painter who hid meanings in crowds is in my guide to Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
6 | The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, Richard Dadd (1855 to 1864)
A hallucinatory fairy scene painted with single hair brushes over nine years, inside Bethlem and Broadmoor. Dadd killed his father in 1843 during a psychotic episode and spent the rest of his life in institutions.
The hospital let him paint, and his doctors kept the works. Freddie Mercury wrote a Queen song about this painting in 1974.
7 | The Rake in Bedlam, William Hogarth (1734)
The last plate of A Rake’s Progress: Tom Rakewell ends in Bedlam, while two fashionable ladies visit the asylum for entertainment, as Londoners really did for a penny.
Hogarth put the paying spectators in the picture to indict them. The moralist with a paintbrush is in my guide to William Hogarth.
8 | Mad Kate, Henry Fuseli (1806)
A woman driven mad by grief stares past us on a stormy shore, hands clasped, hair loose. The figure comes from a poem by William Cowper, who fought mental illness himself.
Romanticism turned madness into weather. The painter of nightmares is in my guide to Henry Fuseli.
9 | The Madness of Hugo van der Goes, Emile Wauters (1872)
The great Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes suffered a breakdown in 1481 and was treated in his monastery with music, on the theory that melody could heal the mind.
Wauters painted that scene four centuries later, and Van Gogh, who identified with Hugo, mentioned the picture in his letters more than once.
10 | Pinel Freeing the Insane, Tony Robert Fleury (1876)
Dr Philippe Pinel orders the chains struck from patients at the Salpetriere around 1795, the founding legend of humane psychiatry.
Historians note the real unchaining owed much to the superintendent Jean Baptiste Pussin, whom the painting leaves out. Even medical progress gets a stage version.
11 | Malle Babbe, Frans Hals (about 1633)
A cackling woman with a beer tankard and an owl on her shoulder. The real Malle Babbe lived in the Haarlem workhouse, and Hals painted her at close range, fast, without cruelty.
The owl marked folly in Dutch proverbs. The fastest brush of the Dutch golden age is in my guide to Frans Hals.
12 | Saul and David, Rembrandt (about 1655)
King Saul, tormented by an evil spirit, listens to young David’s harp and hides his tears in a curtain, one hand still on his spear.
The Bible’s first case study of mental torment, painted as a man trying not to cry. It hangs in the Mauritshuis, and the painter of inner weather is in my guide to Rembrandt.
Minds on canvas, common questions
What is the most famous painting about madness? The Scream by association, Goya’s Madhouse and Gericault’s Monomaniacs by subject.
Did Van Gogh paint The Starry Night in an asylum? Yes, at Saint Remy in June 1889, from his room’s view and his imagination combined.
What happened to Gericault’s ten portraits? Five survive, in Lyon, Paris, Ghent, Winterthur and Springfield. The other five vanished in the 19th century.
Could people really visit Bedlam? Yes. Until the late 18th century, London’s asylum admitted paying visitors as entertainment.
Were these painters mocking their subjects? The strongest works do the opposite: Gericault, Hals and Goya painted patients as people, decades before medicine caught up.
One closing fact: in 2024, one of Gericault’s lost monomaniac portraits was reported found in an Italian private collection, 160 years after the trail went cold. The attribution is still being examined.