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.
Théodore Géricault's color palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each. Each swatch is an interpretation of the materials behind it, not a sample taken from a single work. How the palettes are made
Medusa sea
Dark, threatening sea of the Medusa.
Material: Prussian blue, lamp black, raw umber
RGB(42, 58, 74)
Corpse flesh
Greenish-yellow flesh studied from actual cadavers.
Material: Yellow ochre, terre verte, lead white
RGB(138, 122, 96)
Distress sail
The tattered sail — focal point of desperate hope.
Material: Yellow ochre, raw sienna, lead white
RGB(168, 138, 90)
Bitumen dark
Bitumen-laden dark — now even darker due to aging.
Material: Bitumen, burnt umber (darkened over time)
RGB(27, 20, 8)
Storm sky grey
Leaden sky over the raft.
Material: Lamp black, lead white, raw umber
RGB(90, 90, 88)
Dying skin
Drained, dehydrated flesh at the edge of death.
Material: Yellow ochre, raw umber, lead white
RGB(184, 152, 112)
Pigments used: Prussian blue · Umber · Lamp black · Green earth · Ochre · Lead white · Sienna · Bitumen
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.
By Pigmentoria · Published · Palette: interpretive reconstruction
Further reading: Theodore Gericault — Nina Athanassoglou-KallmyerAs an Amazon Associate, Pigmentoria earns from qualifying purchases. This page may contain affiliate links.
Also in this era
Working at the same time
Elsewhere in the atlas, in other movements and other media, these were the hands at work during the same years.