Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), French painter, perhaps the most influential artist of his time, and a seminal figure in 19th-century Romanticism.

Géricault, born into a wealthy Rouen family, studied with the French painters Carle Vernet and Pierre Guérin and, from 1816 to 1817, also travelled to Italy to study. He was greatly influenced by the work of Michelangelo and other Italian Renaissance painters, as well as that of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. Early in his career, Géricault's paintings began to exhibit qualities that set him apart from such Neo-Classical French painters as Jacques-Louis David. Géricault soon became the acknowledged leader of the French Romantics. His Charging Chasseur (1812, Louvre, Paris) and Wounded Cuirassier (1814, Louvre) display violent action, bold design, and dramatic colour, and evoke powerful emotion. These characteristics appeared in heightened form in his immense and overpowering canvas Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819, Louvre), showing the dying survivors of a contemporary shipwreck. The painting's disturbing combination of idealized figures and realistically depicted agony, as well as its gigantic size and graphic detail, aroused a storm of controversy between those artists who espoused the established Neo-Classical tradition and those who took a different view of subjects proper to artistic depiction. Its depiction of a politically volatile scandal (the wreck was due to government mismanagement) also caused controversy.

In 1820 Géricault travelled to England, where he painted his Race for the Derby at Epsom (Louvre). At the time of his death, Géricault was engaged in painting a series of portraits of mental patients that demonstrate the preoccupation of the Romantic artists with derangement and neurosis. Among his other works are a number of bronze statuettes, a superb series of lithographs, and hundreds of drawings and colour sketches.