Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (Rouen, September 26, 1791 - Paris, January 26, 1824) was a French painter and exponent of Romantic art.
Géricault carried out his early painting experiences in the French neoclassical milieu, which at that time was influenced by the figures of David and Ingres. After a stay in Rome, where he had the opportunity to study the works of Michelangelo and Raphael, he returned to Paris, in 1817, where he met Eugène Delacroix.
During those years he produced his most famous painting, The Raft of the Medusa, which was exhibited in the 1819 Autumn Salon and received harsh criticism.
In the following years, his interest in a stark and naked naturalism led him to favor themes with a macabre taste, such as the heads of the decapitated or portraits of the insane and mentally deranged locked up in asylums. A highly introverted character, Gericault already represents the prototype of the later Romantic artist: amoral and antisocial, desperate and cursed, feeding his genius with excesses and transgressions.
The taste for the horrid and the rejection of beauty immediately gives the sense of his poetics: an art that is not meant to be easy and consolatory but to shake the deepest feelings of the human soul, proposing gruesome images. His life ended in 1824, when he was only 32 years old. His legacy, in the figurative field, was mainly taken up by his friend Delacroix.
Théodore Géricault's Biography
Théodore Géricault was born into a family originally from the English Channel, which five years after his birth moved to Paris (1796). He grew up in a solid and wealthy environment, which guaranteed him a good and regular education at the Lycée Impérial. Soon the young Géricault discovered his passions, the artistic and the military, both united by a deep love for horses.
Horses that would be the subject of numerous studies and paintings. His economic affluence would come to an end only shortly before his early death, which occurred after a long and painful agony, due to a fall from a horse and, most likely, a venereal disease.
His artistic studies began with his entry into the atelier of Carle Vernet, where he also met his son, Horace Vernet, and continued in the atelier of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, and then completed at the School of Fine Arts in Paris.
His fame began in 1812 when he presented the painting Officer of the Imperial Guard Cavalry at the Salon. It was born of his observation at the market of a horse rearing up while pulling a cart, and then transforming the subject into a heroic one thanks to an officer friend (Dieudonné, lieutenant of the Guides) who posed for the horseman, and thanks to posing advice given by Baron d'Aubigny.
The historical moment that contemplated Napoleon's victories made the painting even more appreciable. At the Salon of 1814, the artist exhibited the canvas with the Wounded Cuirassier Leaving the Battlefield (Paris, Louvre),
where while retaining the epic tone of the history paintings in accordance with the new Romantic climate, he substituted for the usual celebration of victory the depiction of suffering and dignified defeat in an anti-heroic vision, at least according to traditional iconography, characterized by uncertainty in the gait and the difficulty of holding the horse in check on the steep terrain.
Both the fact that the unfavorable timing for the Napoleonic campaigns made the subject unhappy, and the fact that the proportions between horse and cuirassier were not felt to be correct (early studies for the painting did not include the horse), meant that Géricault could not regain the success of two years earlier.
In 1816 he entered the Prix de Rome (a prize that, on the basis of a very tough selection in the form of a multi-test competition, gave a scholarship to study for a year in Rome, considered the city of art par excellence) but was unsuccessful. But Géricault decided to travel to Italy anyway, at his own expense, partly because he wished to sever his love affair with Alexandrine Caruel, his aunt by marriage, hoping that a long separation would heal the untenable situation.
In Italy he studied Italian art and technique intensively (appreciating and imitating, in some of his best work, the Venetian colorism of Titian and Tintoretto), especially during his stay in Florence. In Rome he immortalized his beloved horses by portraying them at the "Race of the Barbary Horses" and in the Roman countryside.
Returning to Paris in 1817, Géricault realized that his relationship with his young aunt was far from over; she would also give him a son, Hippolytus George.
He then decided to devote himself more to drawing, using lithography, which was in vogue at that time and allowed great expressiveness. Favorite themes are social ones: his attention is drawn to human suffering, defeat, and tragedy.
Of this period are the lithographs Return from Russia, dedicated to the wounded and exhausted French soldiers returning from the disastrous military campaign, and The Guard of the Louvre in which he illustrates a news story read in the newspaper, of a war amputee who, mistaken for a beggar, is turned away from the Louvre by a guard;
the veteran then opens his coat displaying his medals, to the applause of onlookers, causing the justifiable embarrassment of the guard, who perhaps up to that moment felt proud and superior to others because of the uniform of order he wears, and now has before him a true hero.
It is precisely this passion for investigating reality that leads him to become involved in news reporting. While studying the case of the murder of a judge, he is joined by the shocking report of a tragic shipwreck that occurred in 1816. It is 1818 and only now does news reach the public about this fact that the government wants to cover up.
The frigate Meduse was carrying, along with other ships, a French delegation to the Senegalese Colony of St. Louis. About 400 people were on board. On July 2, 1816 (on the fourteenth day of sailing) the Meduse wrecked on a shoal. There were insufficient lifeboats, and a raft was built to accommodate the shipwrecked men who were without a means of rescue. There were one hundred forty-nine men crammed into the raft.
Soon (incomprehensible why) the cable that allowed the other lifeboats to tow the raft was cut. The raft was abandoned to the waves and nothing was done to rescue it. A hard struggle for survival began (and this is what strikes Géricault). Some, dying, were thrown overboard; hunger, thirst and desperation even gave rise to episodes of cannibalism.
Twelve were the days of abandonment and struggle, and when a ship, the Argus, picked up the castaways, they were only fifteen in number and all dying. It means that as many as one hundred and thirty-four were dead in those terrible twelve days spent in the agonizing consciousness of having death on board. Initially Géricault thought of making a series of lithographs illustrating the whole affair.
Then he came up with the idea of making a single, large painting, including the episode of cannibalism, significant in illustrating the despair. He took a studio near the Hospital, and studied live sick, dying, dead bodies, even copying anatomical pieces (heads, arms, feet) to use to indicate cannibalism.
He then asked friends to model for him to compose the scene (including a friend with jaundice, chosen as perfect for the role). Notable among the models was his painter friend Eugène Delacroix (who is the dead man in the left foreground).
The painting was retouched when it had already been placed for the 1819 Salon exhibition. The title was, generically, Shipwreck Scene, but it was obvious to all what a shipwreck it was. Even the king saw it (praising its art, but glossing over the embarrassing subject matter: indeed, the controversy over responsibility for the incident was bitter).
The painting then obtained an exclusive Exhibition in England and Ireland, which took Géricault away from Paris for more than a year, only to see him return rich and honored.
In 1822 the financial investments he made on his return from England prove to be a swindle that causes him huge losses. A form of depression also manifests itself (according to some caused by the criticism of his art suffered because of his extraordinary sensitivity, according to others caused by his sentimental situation), which leads him to turn to the young and already well-known alienist Dr. Etienne-Jean Georget.
In addition to therapy, a sincere relationship of mutual esteem seems to have developed, leading Gericault to make 10 live portraits of monomaniacal alienates.
We do not know whether the idea of portraying the sufferers was Géricault's, and the doctor granted him the necessary permissions to approach these subjects and have them pose, and then received the paintings as a gift as a token of gratitude, or whether the idea was the doctor's own, putting the painter's rare talent to good use to obtain paintings that could bear witness to the typical features of the individual manias.
The ten works were soon divided between Dr. Georget (with whom five, the ones we have, remained) and his colleagues (these five works, however, turn out to be scattered today). The monomanias that remain documented for us are envy, gambling mania, kleptomania and murder, child abduction, and military command mania.
The expressions are captured with such exceptional acuity and precision that diagnosis is possible. They remain among the finest portraits ever made. Their dating is uncertain, but should be between 1822 and 1823.
Also in 1822 occurred the two falls from horseback that, when neglected, caused him a spinal cord injury, hence the paralysis and finally death. Indeed, on January 26, 1824, after a month and a half of agony, Géricault died. The Louvre Museum, in that same year, purchased the now famous Raft of the Medusa painting.
After that purchase, the great and influential Ingres criticized the Louvre's choice, expressing strong doubts about the painting's artistic legitimacy:
"I would like them to remove the painting of the 'Medusa' from the Louvre Museum [...] I cannot tolerate these 'Medusa' and these other amphitheater paintings, which of man show us only the corpse, reproduce nothing but the ugly, the filthy; no, I cannot tolerate them! Art must be nothing but the beautiful and teach nothing but the beautiful."
Théodore Géricault's Works
Paintings
- Self-Portrait as a Young Man, 1810, oil on paper, 21x14 cm., Paris, coll. Priv.
- Imperial Guard cavalry officer at the charge, 1812
- Wounded cuirassier leaving the battlefield, 1814, Paris, Musée du Louvre
- Bugler of the Hussars, 1815, oil on canvas, 46x38 cm., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum
- Race of the Bàrberi in Rome, 1816, oil on cardboard and canvas, 44.5x59.6 cm, Baltimore (Maryland), Walters Art Gallery
- Horse held by slaves, 1816, oil on cardboard and canvas, 48.5x60.5 cm, Rouen, Musée des Beaux Arts
- Capture of a wild horse in the Roman countryside, 1816, oil on canvas, 48.5x60.5 cm, Rouen
- The Oxen Market, 1817, oil on cardboard and canvas, 56.5x48 cm., Cambridge (Mass.), Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (Grenville L. Winthrop Bequest)
- The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19, oil on canvas, 491x716 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre
- The Epsom Derby, 1821, oil on canvas, 92x122.5 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre
- The Chalk Kiln, 1822-23, oil on canvas, 50x60 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
- Alienated with monomania of play, 1822-23, oil on canvas, 77x64.5 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre
- Alienated with monomania of envy, 1822-23, oil on canvas, 72x58 cm, Lyon, Musèe des Beaux-Arts
- Alienated with monomania of military command, 1822-23, oil on canvas, 81x65cm, Winterthur, Sammlung Oskar Reinhart "äm Römerholz"
- Alienated with monomania of theft and murder, 1822-23, oil on canvas, 61x51cm, Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten
- Alienated with monomania of child abduction, 1822-23, oil on canvas, 64.8x54 cm, Springfield (Massachusetts), museum of Fine Arts (James Philip Gray Collection)
- Portrait of a Negro, 1823-24, oil on cardboard and canvas, 50x46cm., Paris, private collection
- The Companions, 1823-1824, oil on canvas, 65x40 cm Venice, Museum of Fine Arts
Sculptures
- Cheval écorché; (Flayed horse)a
- Cheval arrêté par un homme; (Horse stopped by a man)
- Nymphe et Satyre; (Nymph and Satyr)
- Bœuf terrassé par un tigre; (Ox landed by a tiger)
- Nègre brutalisant une femme; (Negro mistreating a woman)
- Statue équestre de l'empereur Alexandre; (Equestrian statue of the Emperor Alexander)
- Lion au repos; (Lion at rest)
- Cavalier Antique; (Ancient knight)
- Écorché; (Flayed.)