Théodore Géricault
1791–1824French · Romanticism 1780–1850
He died at thirty-two after a series of riding accidents, having painted one of the largest and most scandalous pictures of the century. The Raft of the Medusa is a news story rendered at the scale of a history painting, and that transposition is the whole point.
Formation
From a wealthy Rouen family, which meant he never had to take commissions, trained briefly under Carle Vernet and Guérin, and educated himself principally by copying in the Louvre — Rubens above all. He was obsessed with horses, which killed him. He spent 1816–17 in Italy absorbing Michelangelo, and returned to a France where the wreck of the frigate Méduse had become a political scandal implicating the restored monarchy.
Technique
Research first. For the Raft he interviewed survivors, had the ship's carpenter build him a scale model of the raft, studied dying patients in hospitals and brought severed limbs and heads from the morgue into his studio to paint decomposition accurately — his assistants recorded the smell. He then built the composition through numerous oil studies before working on a canvas seven metres wide. The painting is executed on a dark ground with strong bituminous darks, which is a technical catastrophe: the bitumen never dried, and the shadows have cracked and sunk badly, so the picture is now considerably darker and more damaged than when exhibited.
The palette
Sombre, warm and deliberately corpse-like. Earths, bitumen, bone black, lead white, vermilion and lake, with the flesh painted in a greenish-grey pallor that shocked viewers used to idealised bodies. The one bright note is the scrap of red cloth being waved at the horizon, and every diagonal in the composition drives toward it. The tonal scheme is essentially Caravaggesque, applied to a contemporary event.
Legacy
Delacroix, who posed for one of the figures, took the ambition and the handling directly. The Raft also established that a painter could take a current political disaster and treat it at the scale and seriousness previously reserved for classical history — a precedent that runs through Goya, Manet's Execution of Maximilian and Picasso's Guernica. His late portraits of psychiatric patients, painted for a doctor, are unlike anything else in the period.
Further reading: Theodore Gericault — Nina Athanassoglou-KallmyerPalette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Prussian blue · Umber · Lamp black · Green earth · Ochre · Lead white · Sienna · Bitumen