How a biologist turned amateur sleuth to solve a century-old art riddle

On a hot summer night in 2018, Javier Burgos stayed up late on his computer. His wife and daughters were already asleep when he decided to do another round of Google searches. This time the biologist’s quest to solve a century-old art riddle took him to a 2013 exhibition in Ravenna, Italy.

Burgos dully watched the first seconds of a video of the show when something caught his eye. When he paused the video, the still image showed a museum wall hung with two portraits. He recognised one of them, a 19th-century painting called Le Medecin Chef de l’Asile de Bouffon by Théodore Géricault, one of the masters of French romanticism. But the other portrait was new to him.

It showed a man frowning, with sad eyes staring at the void. The painting was mostly dark except for the lit-up face, the effect highlighting the subject’s very pale skin. To Burgos, the craft and the colours suggested again the hand of Gericáult, but this painting was not in the catalogues raisonées that list the known artworks of a painter. He felt a shiver of excitement.

The mystery that Burgos, who works at Valencia’s Jaume I University, was trying to solve traces back to the winter of 1822, when a psychiatrist named Étienne-Jean Georget commissioned Géricault to produce portraits of some of his patients.

Georget and other French clinicians of the 19th century were among the first to approach the causes of insanity in a scientific fashion. They created a new way of classifying mental illnesses and wrote long treaties describing their patients. These authors argued that insanity could be caused by “monomania” – a pathological obsession around a single idea, such as drinking alcohol, gambling or stealing. They also believed that it was possible to diagnose it by analysing a person’s facial expression.

While this field of science is largely discredited today, its ideas were popular for a few decades. With Géricault’s portraits, Georget probably wanted to keep visual records of a few case-studies of these monomanias.

When Georget died, the series was lost – until 1863, when French historian Louis Vardiot rediscovered five of the paintings. They were in an attic in the German city of Baden-Baden and belonged to one of Georget’s disciples, known only as Doctor Lachèze.

Today these paintings are exhibited in five museums around the world. Experts praise them as some of Géricault’s best works of his final years, painted after his acclaimed masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa, and just a few years before his death. The dignity and rigour with which he portrayed the patients, and the fact that the series bridges art and science, make these five paintings extraordinary.

But according to Vardiot, there were 10 monomanias in total. After Georget’s death, five of them were acquired by Lachèze and the other five by another of Georget’s disciples, a doctor called Marèchal. Nobody knew what had happened to the second lot.

Burgos was immediately drawn to this story. As an art aficionado and a biologist who conducts research into Alzheimer’s disease, it combined his two biggest interests, art and neurology.

“If the paintings existed, where were they? I started investigating, and one thing led to another. Trying to find them was almost a logical decision,” Burgos said.

Over the next months he visited museums, browsed art catalogues and read the psychiatric treaties written by Georget and his colleagues in search of clues – all in vain, until that summer night, when he finally found a promising lead. He managed to obtain the exhibition catalogue and confirmed the painting had indeed been attributed to Géricault. The title was also revealing: Portrait of a Man. Homo Melancholicus.

Melancholy was a well-known monomania, which suggested the portrait could be one of the missing paintings of the series. Burgos found additional evidence for this. He noted that the subject was wearing something that resembled a liturgical vestment, and that his hair seemed tonsured. According to the old psychiatry texts, religious fanaticism was one of the causes of melancholy.

With great efforts, he was able to contact the owner of the painting, a private collector in Italy. To his surprise, they offered to show him the painting. “They were very generous, they even let me hold the painting, a painting that is worth millions,” remembers Burgos. “It was a wonderful day that changed my life.”

Passionate about art but with no first-hand knowledge of its commercial side, he published his findings in the medical journal The Lancet Neurology. And just a few months later, he received an email from a gallerist in Versailles. He’d read the article and had a similar portrait which could also be a monomania. Burgos flew to France to meet him.

This new portrait, which is not officially recognised as a Géricault painting, showed a bearded middle-aged man wearing a hat and a white shirt. One of the first things that struck Burgos was that the shirt was unbuttoned. The monomania series was painted during the winter and all patients wear warm clothes. Burgos and the gallerist speculated that this painting could represent the monomania of drunkenness. The psychiatry texts noted that patients with this monomania experienced abnormally high body temperature. Burgos identified other elements to support this view: the redness of the cheeks, wounds in the forehead and the fact that the man is wearing a winter hat.

But there was something else. In the back of the painting, a handwritten note in French read: “This portrait of an insane man painted by Géricault was given to me by the widow of D Maréchal in 1866, Paris, 9 November, Louis Lemaire”. A chemical analysis of the note dates it in the second half of the 19th century. In 2022, Burgos published this second finding in the same medical journal.

Finally, earlier this year, Burgos claimed that a third painting, called Portrait of a Man Called Vendéen, was also part of the series. Unlike the other two, which are owned by private collectors, this painting is currently exhibited in the Louvre museum and recognised as being painted by Géricault. It shows a man with a light beard wearing a large hat and a blue coat. His face is only partially illuminated and he is looking to his right.

Burgos had noted this painting was similar in size and style to the monomanias, but was aware that experts didn’t consider it to be part of the series. He wanted to know why and investigated their catalogues. There, he began to find inconsistencies.

“Philippe Grunchec wrote in 1978 that the Vendéen was different in size to the known monomanias, which is obviously wrong. And he cited Klaus Berger’s 1955 catalogue to support the idea that the painting is not part of the series,” said Burgos. “Berger did say the painting was not part of the series, but he didn’t provide any evidence, he simply cited another expert, René Doumic.”

Doumic had written a review on the Vendéen in 1938, after the Louvre acquired the painting. When Burgos read it, he was surprised to see that Doumic had actually gone to great lengths to argue that the painting was likely a monomania. Only in the last paragraphs, he speculated about other possibilities.

Once reassured that the painting could indeed be part of the series, he went again to the psychiatry texts. In one of them, he found a description of a 30-year-old man from the city of Vendée “who does not let himself be shaved”. This man had lived in his childhood the political revolt against the French Revolution, a well-documented episode known as the “war of Vendée”. As a consequence, the text said, he had developed the monomania of “political strife”.

“It all matched, the size, the style, the dates and the medical description,” said Burgos, who for the third time published his conclusion in The Lancet Neurology.

Most art experts have met these findings with silence. Gregor Wedekind, a professor for modern and contemporary art history at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, calls the story “problematic” and says: “There is no serious art historical debate about it.”

Wedekind casts doubts on the authenticity of the first two paintings. He argues that without more information on their origin and more thorough analyses, they can’t be assigned to Géricault or the monomania series. He calls for “critical caution” regarding the handwritten note, explaining that such documents “are very common and just as unreliable as supposed original signatures”. And says that Burgos’ credentials and arguments on the Vendéen are insufficient to ascribe the painting to the monomanias. “This is simply not enough,” he said.

Burgos is not worried about the lack of impact of his findings in the art world and believes that time will prove him right. “I would love it if someone published a paper about one of the three paintings confirming or refuting my findings, so we could start a high level academic discussion about this,” he said, noting that it’s still early days for that. “But I think it will happen at some point.”

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