A woman tied to her bed

‘Exact, keen, expert at finding out the pathetic or the ironical side of things, and at seizing its essential features clearly, intensely, and fancifully; endowed with a fine sensibility exercised daily by observation, and dominated by an ardent love of truth, such is the nature of the young artist, M. G. Dupuis, whose talent reveals itself at once fresh and full of strong endeavour’, with these words Georges Dupuis was described, at the beginning of his career in 1902, by Gabriel Mourey (‘A French New Designer’, Studio, 24 (1902), p. 100).

The study was used in the same year to illustrate a new edition of Les Amours d'un Interne, a novel by Jules Clarétie (1840-1913) originally published in 1899. The drawing introduces the eighth chapter where a young woman, while visiting her mother in a mental hospital, realizes that the dehumanizing conditions of the hospital contribute to the madness of its patients.