After a drawing in an album of portrait drawings presented to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1862 by Sir Alexander Morison (1779-1866), who inaugurated the formal teaching of psychiatry in Edinburgh in 1823. The drawings, which cover a period of over twenty years, were originally commissioned as illustrations to Morison's lectures on physiognomy as a method of psychological diagnosis. The earliest are probably the copies of drawings executed for Esquirol at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris. In 1826, after a tour of the Paris asylums, Morison followed Esquirol's example by commissioning portraits of the insane from the miniaturist François Rochard (1798-1858). Morison resumed his commissions to Rochard in 1835, when he was appointed visiting physician to the Bethlem Hospital in London. From 1836 he employed the Scottish portrait and genre painter Alexander Johnston (1815-1891). A selection of Johnston's drawings, along with some by Rochard and copies from Esquirol, were engraved as illustrations to The physiognomy of mental diseases, 1840. About 1841 Morison began to employ Charles Gow, uncle of Andrew Carrick Gow, a Scottish portraitist, who continued to work for Morison throughout the 1840s and many of whose portraits were reproduced in Morison's Outlines of lectures, 1848 (information from the catalogue of the album, compiled by Helen Smailes, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1981)
