In the goldfish bowl: Monomania exhibition at the Rijksmuseum

The 19 ^th century goldfish bowl is part of a room named after that feeling of intense sadness – melancholia. Decorated with enamel paint, gilt and three ships sailing round and around, this empty bowl stands on a fitted carpet with long curtains, the trappings of a wealthy home owner and an unsettling lithograph by Edvard Munch of “woman in three stages”.

In a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, modern artist Fiona Tan was given access to the entire collection so that she could investigate early psychologists' understanding of obsessive behavior – commonly diagnosed as “ monomania ”, the title of the show.

This room in particular and a video installation created by Tan focus on the female experience, at a time when around the world bolshy women could be shut up in hospitals for the insane, doctors used primitive vibrators to treat female “hysteria”, or sexual frustration, and conspiracy theorists ran a strong risk of finding themselves in an asylum.

“This is a goldfish bowl and when I came across it, I knew immediately: I want this because it is a crazy thing,” she said at a press viewing. “But it also says a lot to me about a kind of closed world, a kind of concept in which especially women in the 19th century lived.”

She was inspired to start the two-year project by her drawer of clutter and an image of French artist Théodore Géricault's Portrait of a Kleptomaniac . Supposedly one of ten portraits of people confined in a madhouse where doctor Etienne-Jean Georget attempted to treat them rather than consider them damned, it fascinated her. “This painting took eight years of years of research…irritation, because of the discrepancy between the title, what I am told and don't see…and eight years later here we are,” she said.

In 10 rooms of the temporary wing, she has exhibited Rijksmuseum objects not normally on display: portraits of people in various states of madness and emotion from France, Great Britain and Austria, oriental masks, two artworks by Munch and items from the Netherlands such as intricate lace collars and spookily-hung christening gowns.

Some of the patient diagnoses generate a trigger warning at the start of the show: occupants of the West Riding Asylum in York are described to have been there because of mania such as “pride”, “dementia”, “imbecility” and the blunt “general paralysis of the insane”. Others in Paris were depressed, which hardly seems an irrational response to the death and upheaval following the “bloody [French] revolution of 1789,” Tan noted in a guide.

Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, said it was the first time a modern artist had been invited to respond to the national art and history museum's archive.

“Since 1885, the opening of this building, artists have been inspired by the collection,” he said. “One of the past examples, and an exhibition we made, was on [Joan] Miró and the 17th century interior, where he was inspired by the interiors of Jan Steen. Fiona is fascinated by what goes on in our heads and this collides with the birth of psychiatry in the first half of the 19th century…and the need to set that down in images.”

The last rooms feature imagined audio stories of “the criminal class”, a three-screen video installation by Tan and “unfinished” works including of her behind a mask.

“With masks, I think that if someone slips into a psychosis – there is a term, emotional resonance,” she said at the press view. “If you talk to someone healthy, you have a kind of back-and-forth…but when things aren't going well any more, then it is like talking to someone who isn't there. And that is what I see in the problem of the 'kleptomaniacs'. It is very troubling, but there is also something theatrical in it.”

Her new video work, Janine's Room, runs on a loop and features a woman – apparently, like this artist – reading and researching on an endless loop in a room piled high with books, sand pouring over them and a couple of snails creeping over a pot plant. It's a metaphor for the artistic project, clearly, although shown in this air-conditioned environment, lacks the true assault on the senses of an obsessive's house shared with vermin.

“This story is incomplete and has no ending,” wrote the artist in her guide, arguing for better understanding of mental disorders in the context of their life and times. If there were more personal stories woven around this archive of images, the show, though, would feel more complete.

Monomania runs at the Rijksmuseum from July 4 to September 14, 2025