The Iconographic Archive: what does the Visual Culture of the Origins of French Psychiatry in the Early Nineteenth Century reveal to us?
This article constructs a new history of the birth of psychiatry that of its visual culture, through the study of heretofore unpublished and neglected archives. The analysis of artworks commissioned by the first French psychiatrists at the beginning of the nineteenth century highlights, in an exceptional way, the recognition of subjectivation and autonomy of the mentally sick person, which is the inherent hope of psychiatry’s initial project. The artists who fulfilled the first psychiatrists’ commissions expressed this ideal, which was conveyed both by the humanist philanthropy of early psychiatry and by the artistic vocabulary of the nineteenth century. These works thus display both a search for subjective expression and for objectivity. Some artists recognized this subjectivity in the sick persons: either in their portrayals of the ill as autonomous individuals; in portraits of psychiatrists, which infer the presence of the sick persons under the scrutiny of the doctor; and in the asylum architecture that addressed itself to the sick individual’s sensibility and cognition.