It is part of series of ten portraits made for the psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget and is currently kept in the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium.

Psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget, one of the founders of social psychiatry, asked Géricault to do these paintings which would represent each of the clinical models of the disease.

[1] Instead of bringing the ill persons into a classroom to examine their physical characteristics, the doctor instructed Géricault to paint models representing different types of madness.

At the time, to give dignity to those who were mentally ill was new: they were generally excluded from society,[4] and the previous works represented madmen as possessed creatures or ludicrous people, according to a medieval belief.

[1] The paintings are noteworthy for their bravura style, expressive realism, and for their documenting of the psychological discomfort of individuals, made all the more poignant by the history of insanity in Géricault's family, as well as the artist's own fragile mental health.