Théodore Géricault
The young dramatist of Romanticism.
Théodore Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, about the shipwreck of 1816 in which survivors drifted on a raft for almost two weeks. He died at 32.
Théodore Géricault was born in 1791 in Rouen in Normandy into a wealthy family. They moved to Paris when he was small. He had a passion for horses and riding, and the horse became one of his most important subjects. He studied painting under Carle Vernet and then under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, but learned most by copying Rubens and other masters in the Louvre.
At just twenty-one he caused a stir at the Salon of 1812 with The Charging Chasseur, a rider on a rearing horse. Two years later he exhibited The Wounded Cuirassier. Both are in the Louvre. In 1816–17 he lived in Italy and was influenced by Michelangelo.
His masterpiece is The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) in the Louvre. It depicts a real scandal. In 1816 the frigate Medusa was wrecked off West Africa. The officers took the lifeboats, and some 150 people were left on a raft. After almost two weeks of starvation, murder and cannibalism, fifteen were rescued. Géricault interviewed survivors, built a model of the raft and studied corpses in hospital morgues. The painting is huge, and the dying figures form a pyramid rising towards a small, distant rescue ship. The picture was also a criticism of the regime, which had appointed an incompetent captain.
Géricault exhibited The Raft of the Medusa in London in 1820 to large crowds. In England he painted The Derby at Epsom (1821), now in the Louvre, and made lithographs of the poor in London. Back in Paris he painted a series of portraits of mentally ill patients, in collaboration with a doctor. They are full of compassion, and five of them survive. He had a secret relationship within his family that resulted in a son in 1818.
After several riding accidents and a long illness, Géricault died in 1824, only 32 years old. He managed to paint few large works, but he is regarded as the first great painter of French Romanticism. His younger friend Eugène Delacroix, who posed for one of the figures on the raft, carried on his legacy.