"A bruised reed shall he not break": John Miles's portraits of patients at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. Part 2.

Abstract

This is the second of two papers which examine a series of portraits of patients at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum (REA) which were undertaken in the 1880s by John Miles, who, as well as being a professional painter, was also an inmate of the Morningside institution. Alongside the portraits by Miles, we began, in Paper 1, to discuss a second series of portraits of the same patients, contained in a collection, entitled Bruised Reeds. In this paper we focus on the remaining portraits in this collection, before discussing the wider implications of the two series of portraits. These two series are of interest for several reasons. They are an example of patient art, only a small portion of which has survived from nineteenth century asylums. They are also in the tradition of patient portraiture. The patients in the portraits have been identified and their case notes examined. This information complements the portraits and helps to build a fuller picture of individual patients and their life in the Morningside Asylum. The case notes also reveal the symptomatology and behaviour of the patients. We discuss if the Bruised Reeds portraits were also by Miles, and suggest they were not.