Géricault

Classic and romantic, realistic and poetic, the man who painted The Raft of the Medusa, of an immeasurable genius, is one of the best painters of his time.
Gericault was born in Rouen in 1791 into a well-to-do middle class family. His father having obtained a position in Paris, he became a mediocre student at the imperial lyceum, more interested in horses than in attending school.

Upon leaving the lyceum in 1808 he profited from the fortune he received from his mother to dedicate himself to painting. He entered the studio of Carle Vernet, a horse painter then very well thought of, then into that of Guerin, who would shape an entire generation of romantic painters (Delacroix).

At the Napoleon Museum, the present day Louvre, he copied the great painters of the preceding centuries. The baroque amplitude of Rubens fascinated him, and his comrades in the studio mocked him by calling him "Rubens' cook".

Gericault first displayed in the Salon of 1812. There was a favorable critical reception of his Equestrian Portrait of an Officer (Louvre), a painting which earned him a gold medal. The audacity of the movement, the solidity of the composition, and the lighting effects make this figure of one of the emperor's soldiers by itself express the glory of the brilliant Napoleonic years. The peaking of the empire was so brief, however, that from the beginning of the end in 1813, Gericault tried rather to communicate feelings of defeat and ruin, which he expressed in The Wounded Sharpshooter Leaving the Field (Louvre).

In 1814, after the first Restoration, in spite of his Napoleonic sympathies, he joined the royalist camp and signed up with the red musketeers of the king, who accompanied Louis XVIII into exile in Ghent during the Hundred Days (1815). In 1816 he fled from the embarrassment of an affair with a married woman to Italy. He visited Florence and Rome, sketched antiques, copied Raphael and particularly Michelangelo, whom he admired above all. In Rome he joined Delacroix and Ingres.

In 1817, after he returned to Paris, he set himself up in the rue des Martyrs, in the quarter of the "New Athenians" and rented a studio next to that of his friend Horace Vernet, son of Carle. He dedicated himself to lithography, a new means of expression which was beginning to be developed. Between the spring of 1818 and August of 1819 he was mainly involved in developing The Raft of the Medusa, which occupied all his energy. Displayed in the Salon of 1819, this monumental work (thirty five square meters) created a scandal. Exhausted by such a work and discouraged by its failure, he left Paris and went to London in the spring of 1820.

There he came to know Lawrence and his enthusiasm for Constable. His visit across the Channel was fruitful. With The Horse Race at Epsom (Louvre) he tried to capture an instant in oils. On his way back to France he passed through Brussels to greet the great David. Incapacitated by an accident with a horse, from which he never recovered, he completed his last paintings, portraits of fools , like The Murdering Fool (Ghent) and planned two enormous canvases, The Treaty of the Blacks and The Opening of the Gates of the Inquisition. His death on January 26, 1824, prevented him from realizing his plans, and he left an enormous work unfortunately never finished.

The genius of Gericault escapes any strict classification; it is at the same time classical and romantic, realistic and poetical. He belonged to the "ardent and nervy generation" of Musset, which the Napoleonic period influenced so deeply.