Bruised Reeds

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.

This is the first 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. The portraits by John Miles 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. Miles’s work is of interest because he was both a professional artist and a patient.