Theodore Gericault

Theodore Gericault (26 September 1791 - 26 January 1824) was a profoundly influential French artist, painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings. Although he died young, he became one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.

Born in Rouen, France, Gericault was educated in the tradition of English sporting art by Carle Vernet and classical figure composition by Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, a rigorous classicist who disapproved of his student's impulsive temperament, but recognized his talent.

Gericault soon left the classroom, choosing to study at the Louvre instead, where he copied from paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velazquez, and Rembrandt for about six years, from 1810 to 1815. There he found a vitality which he preferred to the prevailing school of Neoclassicism.

His first major work, The Charging Chasseur, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1812, revealed the influence of the style of Rubens and an interest in the depiction of contemporary subject matter. This youthful success, ambitious and monumental, was followed by a change in direction: for the next several years Gericault produced a series of small studies of horses and cavalrymen. He exhibited Wounded Cuirassier at the Salon in 1814, a work more labored and less well received. In the nearly two years that followed he underwent a self-imposed study of figure construction and composition, all the while evidencing a personal predilection for drama and expressive force.

A trip to Florence and Rome (1816-17), prompted in part by the desire to flee from a romantic entanglement with his aunt, ignited a fascination with Michelangelo. Rome itself inspired the preparation of a monumental canvas, the Race of the Barberi Horses, a work of epic composition and abstracted theme that promised to be "entirely without parallel in its time". In the event, Gericault never completed the painting, and returned to France.

Gericault continually returned to the military themes of his early paintings, and the series of lithographs he undertook on military subjects after his return from Italy are considered some of the earliest masterworks in that medium. Perhaps his most significant, and certainly most ambitious work, is The Raft of the Medusa (1819), which depicted the aftermath of a contemporary French shipwreck in which the captain had left the crew and passengers to die. The incident became a national scandal, and Gericault's dramatic interpretation presented a contemporary tragedy on a monumental scale. The painting's notoriety stemmed from its indictment of a corrupt establishment, but it also dramatized a more eternal theme, that of man's struggle with nature. It surely excited the imagination of the young Eugene Delacroix, who posed for one of the dying figures.

The painting ignited political controversy when first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819; it then traveled to England in 1820, where it received much praise. While in London, Gericault witnessed urban poverty, made drawings of his impressions, and published lithographs based on these observations which were free of sentimentality.

After his return to France, Gericault was inspired to paint a series of ten portraits of the insane, the patients of a friend, Dr. Etienne-Jean Georget, a pioneer in psychiatric medicine, with each subject exhibiting a different affliction. The five remaining portraits from the series represent his last triumph. The paintings are noteworthy for their bravura style, expressive realism, and for their documenting of the psychological discomfort of individuals, made all the more poignant by the history of insanity in Gericault's family, as well as the artist's own fragile mental health. His observations of the human subject were not confined to the living, for some remarkable still-lifes-painted studies of severed heads and limbs-have also been ascribed to the artist.

Gericault's last efforts were directed toward preliminary studies for several epic compositions, including the Opening of the Doors of the Spanish Inquisition and the African Slave Trade. The preparatory drawings suggest works of great ambition, but Gericault's waning health intervened. Weakened by riding accidents and chronic tubercular infection, he died in Paris in 1824 after a long period of suffering. His bronze figure reclines, brush in hand, on his tomb at Pere Lachaise, above a low-relief panel of The Raft of the Medusa.