Théodore Géricault

A Norman childhood, a Parisian training

Géricault was born in Rouen in 1791 into a prosperous merchant family and moved to Paris as a child. His interest in horses started early — the family had money and stables and the boy rode nearly every day. In 1808 he entered the Paris studio of Carle Vernet, whose speciality was horse painting; in 1810 he moved on to Pierre Guérin's more academically demanding studio, where he shared a room with a young Eugène Delacroix.[1]

Neither Vernet nor Guérin held him for long. Géricault spent more of his training hours in the Louvre copying Rubens, Titian, and Caravaggio directly, and taught himself as much as any master taught him. His first Salon entry in 1812 — Charging Chasseur, an over-life-size portrait of a mounted officer of the Imperial Guard — won a gold medal at twenty-one and announced a painter who did not intend to work at ordinary scale.[1]

Italy, an affair, and the summer he began the Raft

In 1816 Géricault paid for his own trip to Rome and Florence — a private Grand Tour after failing to win the Prix de Rome. In Rome he studied Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel; the muscular figures on the raft that followed were the direct legacy of that year. He came back to Paris in the autumn of 1817 changed by the trip and privately in trouble: he had begun an affair with Alexandrine-Modeste Caruel, his uncle's twenty-two-year-old wife.[1]

A son, Georges-Hippolyte, was born to Alexandrine in August 1818 and hidden — sent to a village nurse under a false name, and known to his father only through his uncle's household. The scandal shaped the rest of Géricault's life: the affair broke his relationship with his uncle, alienated his father, and drove him into the near-monastic year of work on The Raft of the Medusa. He shaved his head in the autumn of 1818 to keep himself from going out.

The Raft of the Medusa

The French naval frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of Senegal on 2 July 1816 with an incompetent Bourbon captain at the helm. A hundred and fifty passengers were put onto a makeshift raft cut from the ship's timbers; after thirteen days at sea only fifteen were still alive, and only ten survived the rescue. The scandal — the incompetence of the appointment, the cannibalism on the raft, the government's attempt to bury the story — was still fresh two years later when Géricault began his painting.[2]

He spent eighteen months on the canvas. He interviewed two of the survivors, Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard, and used their book about the ordeal as reference. He commissioned a scale model of the raft from a former Méduse carpenter, borrowed severed limbs from the Beaujon Hospital morgue, and painted body parts drying in his studio to get the tones of dying flesh right. Delacroix modelled for one of the corpses. Géricault settled on the moment the survivors sight the tiny rescue brig Argus in the distance — before they know whether they have been seen.[2]

• The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19)

  The Louvre canvas — its dimensions, its models, the Salon controversy, and the meaning of the Black figure at the summit of the composition.

England, the mad, and the horses

The Raft was hung poorly at the Salon of 1819. The critics were divided — Charles X's government tried to buy the painting to keep it out of the public eye — and Géricault took it to London in 1820, where it was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall and drew forty thousand paying visitors. He spent two years in England painting horse races, English street scenes, and studies of working horses. He came back to Paris in 1822 exhausted and financially strained.[1]

Between 1821 and 1824 Géricault painted a series of ten portraits of patients at the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre hospitals in Paris, working with the young alienist Dr Étienne-Jean Georget. Five of the paintings survive: portraits of a man diagnosed with military mania, a woman with pathological envy, a compulsive gambler, a kidnapper of children, and a kleptomaniac. They are among the earliest sustained portraits of the mentally ill in Western painting, and they treat their subjects with a seriousness the century's medicine did not usually extend to them.[1]

Two falls and a Père-Lachaise grave

Géricault fell from a horse twice in 1822 and 1823. Both accidents damaged his spine. The tumour that followed became tubercular; he was bedridden through his final year and painted with his easel arranged over his bed. Delacroix visited him in December 1823 and reported that even the smaller studies in the sickroom carried the same charge as the Raft. Géricault died on 26 January 1824. He was thirty-two.[1]

He was buried at Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Division 12. Antoine Étex cast a bronze relief of the Raft into the front of the tomb, the first time in the century a French artist's grave carried the reduction of his own most famous work. Delacroix took up the Romantic argument Géricault had begun — his Death of Sardanapalus (1827) and Liberty Leading the People (1830) both owe their scale and their political nerve directly to the Raft.

Studying the dead

To paint The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault went to find what dying and dead bodies actually look like, and did it with a thoroughness that unsettled the people around him.[3]

He arranged access at the Beaujon hospital nearby, drew patients in the last stages of illness, and took severed limbs and heads back to his studio, where he kept them and painted them over days as they changed. Friends recorded the smell. Several of the resulting studies survive as finished paintings in their own right.

He also shaved his head so that he could not go out and be distracted, and worked in near-isolation for months. He was twenty-seven.

The Derby at Epsom

Géricault painted The Derby at Epsom in England in 1821: four racehorses stretched flat out, all four legs off the ground and extended fore and aft, under a low grey sky.

The gallop in The Derby at Epsom is wrong, and it is wrong in an interesting way. No horse has ever moved like that, as Eadweard Muybridge's sequence photographs demonstrated in 1878, more than fifty years later. A galloping horse has all four feet off the ground only when its legs are gathered underneath it.

Painters had used the extended flying gallop for centuries because it reads as speed, and Géricault, who rode all his life and drew horses constantly, used it too. The picture is a reminder that observation has limits the eye cannot get past without a machine.

The English lithographs

Géricault went to London in 1820 with The Raft of the Medusa and stayed about two years. The work he made there is unlike anything else he did.

He had taken up lithography, a process barely twenty years old, in Paris in 1817. In London he used it on the street. Twelve plates were published in 1821 as Various Subjects Drawn from Life and on Stone. One shows an old man begging at a door, under the title Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man; another a paralysed woman being wheeled along in a cart. The rest take in a coal wagon, the entrance to the Adelphi Wharf, farriers at work, and horses going to a fair.[1]

There is no heroism in any of the London plates and no moral supplied. In The Raft of the Medusa Géricault had painted a government scandal at the scale of history painting. In London he turned the same attention on ordinary poverty, at the scale of a print anyone could buy.[4]