Theodore Gericault Biography
Gericault was born September 26, 1791, Rouen, France
and died January 26, 1824, Paris
in full Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Géricault painter who exerted a seminal influence on the development of Romantic art in France. Gericault was a dandy and an avid horseman whose dramatic paintings reflect his flamboyant and passionate personality.
As a student Gericault learned the traditions of English sporting art from the French painter Carle Vernet, and he developed a remarkable facility for capturing animal movement. Gericault also mastered classicist figure construction and composition under the academician Pierre Guérin. Another student of Guérin, Eugène Delacroix, was profoundly influenced by Gericault, finding in his example a major point of departure for his own art.
As demonstrated by his earliest major oil painting, The Charging Chasseur (1812), which depicts an officer astride a rearing horse on a smoky battlefield, Gericault was drawn to the colourist style of the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens and to the use of contemporary subject matter in the manner of an older colleague, the painter Antoine-Jean Gros. At the Salon of 1814, Gericault's painting Wounded Cuirassier shocked critics with its mournful subject and sombre colours. While in Florence and Rome (1816–17), Gericault became fascinated with Michelangelo and Baroque art. His chief project at this time was Race of the Riderless Horse, a heroic frieze composition (never completed) depicting a dangerous race that was an annual event.
After returning to France, Géricault drew a group of lithographs on military subjects that are considered among the earliest masterworks in that medium. Gericault's masterpiece is the large painting entitled The Raft of the Medusa (c. 1819). This painting depicts the aftermath of a contemporary French shipwreck, whose survivors embarked on a raft and were decimated by starvation before being rescued at sea. The shipwreck had scandalous political implications at home—the incompetent captain, who had gained the position because of connections to the Bourbon Restoration government, fought to save himself and senior officers while leaving the lower ranks to die—and so Géricault’s painting of the raft and its inhabitants was greeted with hostility by the government. The painting’s macabre realism, its treatment of the raft incident as epic-heroic tragedy, and the virtuosity of its drawing and tonalities combine to give the painting great dignity and carry it far beyond mere contemporary reportage. The portrayal of the dead and dying, developed within a dramatic, carefully constructed composition, addressed a contemporary subject with remarkable and unprecedented passion.
Disappointed by the reception of The Raft of the Medusa, Gericault took the painting to England in 1820, where it was received as a sensational success. He remained there for two years, enjoying the equine culture and producing a body of lithographs, watercolour paintings, and oil paintings of jockeys and horses. Upon his return to France, his friendship with Étienne Georget, a pioneer in psychiatric studies, inspired Gericault's series of portrait paintings of victims of insanity, each of whom was seen as a “type” of affliction, including Kleptomania and Delusion of Military Command. Repeated riding accidents and chronic tubercular infections ruined Gericault's health, and he died after a long period of suffering.