September 26, 2011 <Back to Index>
PAGE SPONSOR |
Théodore Géricault (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, Géricault was educated in the tradition of English sporting art by Carle Vernet and classical figure composition by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a rigorous classicist who disapproved of his student's impulsive temperament, but recognized his talent. Géricault soon left the classroom, choosing to study at the Louvre instead, where he copied from paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velázquez, 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 Géricault 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, Rome and Naples (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, Géricault never
completed the painting, and returned to France. In 1821, he painted The Derby of
Epsom. Géricault
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 (1818
– 1819), which depicted the aftermath of a contemporary French
shipwreck, Meduse, in which the captain had left
the crew and passengers to die. The
incident became a national scandal, and Géricault'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 Eugène
Delacroix, who posed for one of the dying figures. The
classical depiction of the figures and structure of the composition
stand in contrast to the turbulence of the subject, and creates an
important bridge between the styles of neo-classicism and romanticism. The painting fuses many influences: the Last
Judgment of Michelangelo, the monumental approach to contemporary
events by Antoine-Jean
Gros, figure groupings by Henry
Fuseli, and possibly the
painting Watson and the
Shark by John
Singleton Copley.
The
painting ignited political controversy when first exhibited at the
Paris Salon of 1819; it then traveled to England in 1820, accompanied
by Géricault himself, where it received much praise. While in
London, Géricault 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 in 1821, Géricault was inspired to paint a
series of ten portraits of the insane, the patients of a friend, Dr. Étienne-Jean
Georget, a pioneer in psychiatric medicine, with each subject
exhibiting a different affliction. There are five remaining
portraits from the series, including Insane Woman.
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
Géricault'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. Géricault'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 Géricault'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 Père
Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, above a low-relief panel of The Raft of the Medusa. |