Artist: Josef Karl Rädler

My wife became unfaithful to me. I stood in the way of two gallants (a senior civil servant and a merchant) and they secretly ushered me into the lunatic asylum. … interned unlawfully by her. Discovered in 1909 by Dr H Krug in the margins of one of Josef Karl Rädler's drawings.

In 1893, Rädler was committed to an asylum for the insane by his family as his behaviour had become erratic and irrational. In fact, probably both statements are true. It does seem apparent that he was bi-polar if not schizophrenic. He was officially diagnosed as having circular psychosis with manic tendencies, epilepsy and secondary dementia.

The self-proclaimed court painter of Austria, Siam and Italy - the apostle of humanity was confined in 1893 in the Lainz hospital, Vienna. The laughing philosopher (as he styled himself), the committed pacifist who dreamed of turning churches into museums or art galleries was perhaps not as crazy as thought in his own time.

Rädler lived a marginalised life of melancholy, forsaken by his family, relieved primarily by his art. He lived out his last 24 years in asylums, the last 12 of which were in Mauer-Öhling. This progressive institution encouraged his art, if not as therapy, to occupy an inmate thought of as cantankerous and difficult. These self-taught works of art, now thought of as outsider art, were not looked upon with any eye for aesthetic interest until they were rescued from the rubbish in the 1960s when the mental facility was being modernised, from whence many hundreds entered the Lower Austria Museum in St. Pölten.

There are many aspects to this art that warrant discussion not least the recording of the life of the inmates and carers of the asylums in which the artist lived. Sometimes sardonic otherwise plain descriptive. He does portraits of his fellow lunatics as well as describing the hospital and its gardens. Many works include birds which was a double entendre - allegorically in German to have the bird meant to be crazy, and at the same time they represented freedom. Freedom from the constraints of his immediate incarceration but also freedom from the constraints of society generally. All in all, life in Mauer-Öhling was about as good as could be in a confined world. Clearly there was a humanity and freedom in these institutions, unlike anything known today, which encouraged Rädler to express himself in painting, poetry and prose. Most of his paintings are styled with a framing of text. These writings moralise and preach, proselytise for equal rights for women, and the promotion of his pacificist ideas, particularly after the start of the World War - all of which show him in a sympathetic frame of mind, one which is wanting to communicate his somewhat radical ideas. Rädler was undoubtedly a difficult man but one with a progressive outlook on the world which he understood better than some of those around him who were designated his professional carers.