Théodore Géricault was a French painter, born in Rouen in 1791, who died in Paris in 1824 at thirty-two. People look him up for one picture, The Raft of the Medusa, a canvas more than seven meters wide about a real shipwreck, which hangs in the Louvre. In barely a decade he also painted soldiers, racehorses and portraits of mental patients, and he helped start French Romanticism.
He was a rich man's son who painted cavalry officers until two survivors of a shipwreck published their account. Then he chose a subject no painter had touched: a government that let its own sailors die.
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The facts behind the picture are documented. On 2 July 1816 the frigate Medusa ran aground on a sandbank off West Africa. Three days later at least 150 people were set adrift on a raft. After 13 days the brig Argus found it, and only 15 men were still alive.
Géricault gave the subject eighteen months. He met two of the survivors, the surgeon Henri Savigny and the engineer Alexandre Corréard, and had a scale model of the raft built with the help of the ship's carpenter. He shaved his head, shut himself in a studio, and went to a hospital morgue to study the dead.
Yet the canvas is not what the survivors lived through. It shows a storm, and the morning the Argus appeared the sea was calm. It shows more figures than were still on the raft, many of them corpses. Géricault kept the testimony and rebuilt the scene to hit harder.
What You'll Discover
What his family's money bought him.
Who modeled for his first soldier.
What he kept in his studio.
What the king said about the Raft.
Who these patients were painted for.
Who paid for his tomb.