There are not many portraits you wait all your adult life to see, but so it is with A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank, painted by Théodore Géricault some time after The Raft of the Medusa in 1819. This shattering image of a man with no name is in Britain for the first time, loaned by a small Swiss museum a dozen miles outside Zurich.
To see it with your own eyes is to have a sense of who this man might really be, whether the title seems right, and why Géricault painted him in the first place: all of them unresolved mysteries.
