The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: Focus on The Raft of the Medusa and explain the Influences.

The Raft of the Medusa fuses many influences from the Old Masters, from the Last Judgment and Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael's Transfiguration, to the monumental approach of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), to contemporary events.  By the 18th century, shipwrecks had become a recognised feature of marine art, as well as an increasingly common occurrence as more journeys were made by sea. Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) created many such images, achieving naturalistic colour through direct observation—unlike other artists at that time—and was said to have tied himself to the mast of a ship in order to witness a storm.Although the men depicted on the raft had spent 13 days adrift and suffered hunger, disease and cannibalism, Géricault pays tribute to the traditions of heroic painting and presents his figures as muscular and healthy. According to the art historian Richard Muther, there is still a strong debt to Classicism in the work. The fact that the majority of the figures are almost naked, he wrote, arose from a desire to avoid "unpictorial" costumes. Muther observes that there is "still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death".The influence of Jacques-Louis David can be seen in the painting's scale, in the sculptural tautness of the figures and in the heightened manner in which a particularly significant "fruitful moment"—the first awareness of the approaching ship—is described. In 1793, David also painted an important current event with The Death of Marat. His painting had an enormous political impact during the time of the revolution in France, and it served as an important precedent for Géricault's decision to also paint a current event. David's pupil, Antoine-Jean Gros, had, like David, represented "the grandiosities of a school irredeemably associated with a lost cause", but in some major works, he had given equal prominence to Napoleon and anonymous dead or dying figures. Géricault had been particularly impressed by the 1804 painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa, by Gros.The young Géricault had painted copies of work by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1823), whose "thunderously tragic pictures" include his masterpiece, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, where oppressive darkness and the compositional base of a naked, sprawled corpse obviously influenced Géricault's painting.The foreground figure of the older man may be a reference to Ugolino from Dante's Inferno—a subject that Géricault had contemplated painting—and seems to borrow from a painting of Ugolini by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) that Géricault may have known from prints. In Dante, Ugolino is guilty of cannibalism, which was one of the most sensational aspects of the days on the raft. Géricault seems to allude to this through the borrowing from Fuseli. An early study for The Raft of the Medusa in watercolour, now in the Louvre, is much more explicit, depicting a figure gnawing on the arm of a headless corpse.Several English and American paintings including The Death of Major Pierson by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)—also painted within two years of the event—had established a precedent for a contemporary subject. Copley had also painted several large and heroic depictions of disasters at sea which Géricault may have known from prints: Watson and the Shark (1778), in which a black man is central to the action, and which, like The Raft of the Medusa, concentrated on the actors of the drama rather than the seascape; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (1791), which was an influence on both the style and subject matter of Géricault's work; and Scene of a Shipwreck (1790s), which has a strikingly similar composition. A further important precedent for the political component was the works of Francisco Goya, particularly his The Disasters of War series of 1810–12, and his 1814 masterpiece The Third of May 1808. Goya also produced a painting of a disaster at sea, called simply Shipwreck (date unknown), but although the sentiment is similar, the composition and style have nothing in common with The Raft of the Medusa. It is unlikely that Géricault had seen the picture.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: Explain the Influences of this artwork, The Raft of the Medusa.

The Raft of the Medusa fuses many influences from the Old Masters, from the Last Judgment and Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael's Transfiguration, to the monumental approach of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), to contemporary events.  By the 18th century, shipwrecks had become a recognised feature of marine art, as well as an increasingly common occurrence as more journeys were made by sea. Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) created many such images, achieving naturalistic colour through direct observation—unlike other artists at that time—and was said to have tied himself to the mast of a ship in order to witness a storm.Although the men depicted on the raft had spent 13 days adrift and suffered hunger, disease and cannibalism, Géricault pays tribute to the traditions of heroic painting and presents his figures as muscular and healthy. According to the art historian Richard Muther, there is still a strong debt to Classicism in the work. The fact that the majority of the figures are almost naked, he wrote, arose from a desire to avoid "unpictorial" costumes. Muther observes that there is "still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death".The influence of Jacques-Louis David can be seen in the painting's scale, in the sculptural tautness of the figures and in the heightened manner in which a particularly significant "fruitful moment"—the first awareness of the approaching ship—is described. In 1793, David also painted an important current event with The Death of Marat. His painting had an enormous political impact during the time of the revolution in France, and it served as an important precedent for Géricault's decision to also paint a current event. David's pupil, Antoine-Jean Gros, had, like David, represented "the grandiosities of a school irredeemably associated with a lost cause", but in some major works, he had given equal prominence to Napoleon and anonymous dead or dying figures. Géricault had been particularly impressed by the 1804 painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa, by Gros.The young Géricault had painted copies of work by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1823), whose "thunderously tragic pictures" include his masterpiece, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, where oppressive darkness and the compositional base of a naked, sprawled corpse obviously influenced Géricault's painting.The foreground figure of the older man may be a reference to Ugolino from Dante's Inferno—a subject that Géricault had contemplated painting—and seems to borrow from a painting of Ugolini by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) that Géricault may have known from prints. In Dante, Ugolino is guilty of cannibalism, which was one of the most sensational aspects of the days on the raft. Géricault seems to allude to this through the borrowing from Fuseli. An early study for The Raft of the Medusa in watercolour, now in the Louvre, is much more explicit, depicting a figure gnawing on the arm of a headless corpse.Several English and American paintings including The Death of Major Pierson by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)—also painted within two years of the event—had established a precedent for a contemporary subject. Copley had also painted several large and heroic depictions of disasters at sea which Géricault may have known from prints: Watson and the Shark (1778), in which a black man is central to the action, and which, like The Raft of the Medusa, concentrated on the actors of the drama rather than the seascape; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (1791), which was an influence on both the style and subject matter of Géricault's work; and Scene of a Shipwreck (1790s), which has a strikingly similar composition. A further important precedent for the political component was the works of Francisco Goya, particularly his The Disasters of War series of 1810–12, and his 1814 masterpiece The Third of May 1808. Goya also produced a painting of a disaster at sea, called simply Shipwreck (date unknown), but although the sentiment is similar, the composition and style have nothing in common with The Raft of the Medusa. It is unlikely that Géricault had seen the picture.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: How does The Raft of the Medusa explain its Influences?

The Raft of the Medusa fuses many influences from the Old Masters, from the Last Judgment and Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael's Transfiguration, to the monumental approach of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), to contemporary events.  By the 18th century, shipwrecks had become a recognised feature of marine art, as well as an increasingly common occurrence as more journeys were made by sea. Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) created many such images, achieving naturalistic colour through direct observation—unlike other artists at that time—and was said to have tied himself to the mast of a ship in order to witness a storm.Although the men depicted on the raft had spent 13 days adrift and suffered hunger, disease and cannibalism, Géricault pays tribute to the traditions of heroic painting and presents his figures as muscular and healthy. According to the art historian Richard Muther, there is still a strong debt to Classicism in the work. The fact that the majority of the figures are almost naked, he wrote, arose from a desire to avoid "unpictorial" costumes. Muther observes that there is "still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death".The influence of Jacques-Louis David can be seen in the painting's scale, in the sculptural tautness of the figures and in the heightened manner in which a particularly significant "fruitful moment"—the first awareness of the approaching ship—is described. In 1793, David also painted an important current event with The Death of Marat. His painting had an enormous political impact during the time of the revolution in France, and it served as an important precedent for Géricault's decision to also paint a current event. David's pupil, Antoine-Jean Gros, had, like David, represented "the grandiosities of a school irredeemably associated with a lost cause", but in some major works, he had given equal prominence to Napoleon and anonymous dead or dying figures. Géricault had been particularly impressed by the 1804 painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa, by Gros.The young Géricault had painted copies of work by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1823), whose "thunderously tragic pictures" include his masterpiece, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, where oppressive darkness and the compositional base of a naked, sprawled corpse obviously influenced Géricault's painting.The foreground figure of the older man may be a reference to Ugolino from Dante's Inferno—a subject that Géricault had contemplated painting—and seems to borrow from a painting of Ugolini by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) that Géricault may have known from prints. In Dante, Ugolino is guilty of cannibalism, which was one of the most sensational aspects of the days on the raft. Géricault seems to allude to this through the borrowing from Fuseli. An early study for The Raft of the Medusa in watercolour, now in the Louvre, is much more explicit, depicting a figure gnawing on the arm of a headless corpse.Several English and American paintings including The Death of Major Pierson by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)—also painted within two years of the event—had established a precedent for a contemporary subject. Copley had also painted several large and heroic depictions of disasters at sea which Géricault may have known from prints: Watson and the Shark (1778), in which a black man is central to the action, and which, like The Raft of the Medusa, concentrated on the actors of the drama rather than the seascape; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (1791), which was an influence on both the style and subject matter of Géricault's work; and Scene of a Shipwreck (1790s), which has a strikingly similar composition. A further important precedent for the political component was the works of Francisco Goya, particularly his The Disasters of War series of 1810–12, and his 1814 masterpiece The Third of May 1808. Goya also produced a painting of a disaster at sea, called simply Shipwreck (date unknown), but although the sentiment is similar, the composition and style have nothing in common with The Raft of the Medusa. It is unlikely that Géricault had seen the picture.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: In The Raft of the Medusa, how is the Influences discussed?

The Raft of the Medusa fuses many influences from the Old Masters, from the Last Judgment and Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael's Transfiguration, to the monumental approach of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), to contemporary events.  By the 18th century, shipwrecks had become a recognised feature of marine art, as well as an increasingly common occurrence as more journeys were made by sea. Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) created many such images, achieving naturalistic colour through direct observation—unlike other artists at that time—and was said to have tied himself to the mast of a ship in order to witness a storm.Although the men depicted on the raft had spent 13 days adrift and suffered hunger, disease and cannibalism, Géricault pays tribute to the traditions of heroic painting and presents his figures as muscular and healthy. According to the art historian Richard Muther, there is still a strong debt to Classicism in the work. The fact that the majority of the figures are almost naked, he wrote, arose from a desire to avoid "unpictorial" costumes. Muther observes that there is "still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death".The influence of Jacques-Louis David can be seen in the painting's scale, in the sculptural tautness of the figures and in the heightened manner in which a particularly significant "fruitful moment"—the first awareness of the approaching ship—is described. In 1793, David also painted an important current event with The Death of Marat. His painting had an enormous political impact during the time of the revolution in France, and it served as an important precedent for Géricault's decision to also paint a current event. David's pupil, Antoine-Jean Gros, had, like David, represented "the grandiosities of a school irredeemably associated with a lost cause", but in some major works, he had given equal prominence to Napoleon and anonymous dead or dying figures. Géricault had been particularly impressed by the 1804 painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa, by Gros.The young Géricault had painted copies of work by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1823), whose "thunderously tragic pictures" include his masterpiece, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, where oppressive darkness and the compositional base of a naked, sprawled corpse obviously influenced Géricault's painting.The foreground figure of the older man may be a reference to Ugolino from Dante's Inferno—a subject that Géricault had contemplated painting—and seems to borrow from a painting of Ugolini by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) that Géricault may have known from prints. In Dante, Ugolino is guilty of cannibalism, which was one of the most sensational aspects of the days on the raft. Géricault seems to allude to this through the borrowing from Fuseli. An early study for The Raft of the Medusa in watercolour, now in the Louvre, is much more explicit, depicting a figure gnawing on the arm of a headless corpse.Several English and American paintings including The Death of Major Pierson by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)—also painted within two years of the event—had established a precedent for a contemporary subject. Copley had also painted several large and heroic depictions of disasters at sea which Géricault may have known from prints: Watson and the Shark (1778), in which a black man is central to the action, and which, like The Raft of the Medusa, concentrated on the actors of the drama rather than the seascape; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (1791), which was an influence on both the style and subject matter of Géricault's work; and Scene of a Shipwreck (1790s), which has a strikingly similar composition. A further important precedent for the political component was the works of Francisco Goya, particularly his The Disasters of War series of 1810–12, and his 1814 masterpiece The Third of May 1808. Goya also produced a painting of a disaster at sea, called simply Shipwreck (date unknown), but although the sentiment is similar, the composition and style have nothing in common with The Raft of the Medusa. It is unlikely that Géricault had seen the picture.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: Focus on The Raft of the Medusa and explain the Exhibition and reception.

The Raft of the Medusa was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, under the title Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene), although its real subject would have been unmistakable for contemporary viewers. The exhibition was sponsored by Louis XVIII and featured nearly 1,300 paintings, 208 sculptures and numerous other engravings and architectural designs. Géricault's canvas was the star at the exhibition: "It strikes and attracts all eyes" (Le Journal de Paris). Louis XVIII visited three days before the opening and reportedly said: "Monsieur, vous venez de faire un naufrage qui n'en est pas un pour vous", freely translated as "Monsieur Géricault, your shipwreck is certainly no disaster". The critics were divided: the horror and "terribilità" of the subject exercised fascination, but devotees of classicism expressed their distaste for what they described as a "pile of corpses", whose realism they considered a far cry from the "ideal beauty" represented by Girodet's Pygmalion and Galatea, which triumphed the same year. Géricault's work expressed a paradox: how could a hideous subject be translated into a powerful painting, how could the painter reconcile art and reality? Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie, a French painter and contemporary of Géricault, provided one answer: "Monsieur Géricault seems mistaken. The goal of painting is to speak to the soul and the eyes, not to repel." The painting had fervent admirers too, including French writer and art critic Auguste Jal, who praised its political theme, its liberal position–its advancement of the negro and critique of ultra-royalism–and its modernity. The historian Jules Michelet approved: "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa".Géricault had deliberately sought to be both politically and artistically confrontational. Critics responded to his aggressive approach in kind, and their reactions were either ones of revulsion or praise, depending on whether the writer's sympathies favoured the Bourbon or Liberal viewpoint. The painting was seen as largely sympathetic to the men on the raft, and thus by extension to the anti-imperial cause adopted by the survivors Savigny and Corréard. The decision to place a black man at the pinnacle of the composition was a controversial expression of Géricault's abolitionist sympathies. The art critic Christine Riding has speculated that the painting's later exhibition in London was planned to coincide with anti-slavery agitation there. According to art critic and curator Karen Wilkin, Géricault's painting acts as a "cynical indictment of the bungling malfeasance of France's post-Napoleonic officialdom, much of which was recruited from the surviving families of the Ancien Régime".The painting generally impressed the viewing public, although its subject matter repelled many, thus denying Géricault the popular acclaim which he had hoped to achieve. At the end of the exhibition, the painting was awarded a gold medal by the judging panel, but they did not give the work the greater prestige of selecting it for the Louvre's national collection. Instead, Géricault was awarded a commission on the subject of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he clandestinely offered to Delacroix, whose finished painting he then signed as his own. Géricault retreated to the countryside, where he collapsed from exhaustion, and his unsold work was rolled up and stored in a friend's studio.Géricault arranged for the painting to be exhibited in London in 1820, where it was shown at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, from 10 June until the end of the year, and viewed by about 40,000 visitors. The reception in London was more positive than that in Paris, and the painting was hailed as representative of a new direction in French art. It received more positive reviews than when it was shown at the Salon. In part, this was due to the manner of the painting's exhibition: in Paris it had initially been hung high in the Salon Carré—a mistake that Géricault recognised when he saw the work installed—but in London it was placed close to the ground, emphasising its monumental impact. There may have been other reasons for its popularity in England as well, including "a degree of national self-congratulation", the appeal of the painting as lurid entertainment, and two theatrical entertainments based around the events on the raft which coincided with the exhibition and borrowed heavily from Géricault's depiction. From the London exhibition Géricault earned close to 20,000 francs, which was his share of the fees charged to visitors, and substantially more than he would have been paid had the French government purchased the work from him. After the London exhibition, Bullock brought the painting to Dublin early in 1821, but the exhibition there was far less successful, in large part due to a competing exhibition of a moving panorama, "The Wreck of the Medusa" by the Marshall brothers firm, which was said to have been painted under the direction of one of the survivors of the disaster.The Raft of the Medusa was championed by the curator of the Louvre, comte de Forbin who purchased it for the museum from Géricault's heirs after his death in 1824. The painting now dominates its gallery there. The display caption tells us that "the only hero in this poignant story is humanity".At some time between 1826 and 1830 American artist George Cooke (1793–1849) made a copy of the painting in a smaller size, (130.5 x 196.2 cm; approximately 4 ft × 6 ft), which was shown in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C. to crowds who knew about the controversy surrounding the shipwreck. Reviews favoured the painting, which also stimulated plays, poems, performances and a children's book.  It was bought by a former admiral, Uriah Phillips, who left it in 1862 to the New York Historical Society, where it was miscatalogued as by Gilbert Stuart and remained inaccessible until the mistake was uncovered in 2006, after an enquiry by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, a professor of art history at the University of Delaware.  The university's conservation department undertook restoration of the work.Because of deterioration in the condition of Géricault's original, the Louvre in 1859–60 commissioned two French artists, Pierre-Désiré Guillemet and Étienne-Antoine-Eugène Ronjat, to make a full size copy of the original for loan exhibitions.In the autumn of 1939, the Medusa was packed for removal from the Louvre in anticipation of the outbreak of war.  A scenery truck from the Comédie-Française transported the painting to Versailles in the night of 3 September.  Some time later, the Medusa was moved to the Château de Chambord where it remained until after the end of the Second World War.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: Explain the Exhibition and reception of this artwork, The Raft of the Medusa.

The Raft of the Medusa was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, under the title Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene), although its real subject would have been unmistakable for contemporary viewers. The exhibition was sponsored by Louis XVIII and featured nearly 1,300 paintings, 208 sculptures and numerous other engravings and architectural designs. Géricault's canvas was the star at the exhibition: "It strikes and attracts all eyes" (Le Journal de Paris). Louis XVIII visited three days before the opening and reportedly said: "Monsieur, vous venez de faire un naufrage qui n'en est pas un pour vous", freely translated as "Monsieur Géricault, your shipwreck is certainly no disaster". The critics were divided: the horror and "terribilità" of the subject exercised fascination, but devotees of classicism expressed their distaste for what they described as a "pile of corpses", whose realism they considered a far cry from the "ideal beauty" represented by Girodet's Pygmalion and Galatea, which triumphed the same year. Géricault's work expressed a paradox: how could a hideous subject be translated into a powerful painting, how could the painter reconcile art and reality? Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie, a French painter and contemporary of Géricault, provided one answer: "Monsieur Géricault seems mistaken. The goal of painting is to speak to the soul and the eyes, not to repel." The painting had fervent admirers too, including French writer and art critic Auguste Jal, who praised its political theme, its liberal position–its advancement of the negro and critique of ultra-royalism–and its modernity. The historian Jules Michelet approved: "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa".Géricault had deliberately sought to be both politically and artistically confrontational. Critics responded to his aggressive approach in kind, and their reactions were either ones of revulsion or praise, depending on whether the writer's sympathies favoured the Bourbon or Liberal viewpoint. The painting was seen as largely sympathetic to the men on the raft, and thus by extension to the anti-imperial cause adopted by the survivors Savigny and Corréard. The decision to place a black man at the pinnacle of the composition was a controversial expression of Géricault's abolitionist sympathies. The art critic Christine Riding has speculated that the painting's later exhibition in London was planned to coincide with anti-slavery agitation there. According to art critic and curator Karen Wilkin, Géricault's painting acts as a "cynical indictment of the bungling malfeasance of France's post-Napoleonic officialdom, much of which was recruited from the surviving families of the Ancien Régime".The painting generally impressed the viewing public, although its subject matter repelled many, thus denying Géricault the popular acclaim which he had hoped to achieve. At the end of the exhibition, the painting was awarded a gold medal by the judging panel, but they did not give the work the greater prestige of selecting it for the Louvre's national collection. Instead, Géricault was awarded a commission on the subject of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he clandestinely offered to Delacroix, whose finished painting he then signed as his own. Géricault retreated to the countryside, where he collapsed from exhaustion, and his unsold work was rolled up and stored in a friend's studio.Géricault arranged for the painting to be exhibited in London in 1820, where it was shown at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, from 10 June until the end of the year, and viewed by about 40,000 visitors. The reception in London was more positive than that in Paris, and the painting was hailed as representative of a new direction in French art. It received more positive reviews than when it was shown at the Salon. In part, this was due to the manner of the painting's exhibition: in Paris it had initially been hung high in the Salon Carré—a mistake that Géricault recognised when he saw the work installed—but in London it was placed close to the ground, emphasising its monumental impact. There may have been other reasons for its popularity in England as well, including "a degree of national self-congratulation", the appeal of the painting as lurid entertainment, and two theatrical entertainments based around the events on the raft which coincided with the exhibition and borrowed heavily from Géricault's depiction. From the London exhibition Géricault earned close to 20,000 francs, which was his share of the fees charged to visitors, and substantially more than he would have been paid had the French government purchased the work from him. After the London exhibition, Bullock brought the painting to Dublin early in 1821, but the exhibition there was far less successful, in large part due to a competing exhibition of a moving panorama, "The Wreck of the Medusa" by the Marshall brothers firm, which was said to have been painted under the direction of one of the survivors of the disaster.The Raft of the Medusa was championed by the curator of the Louvre, comte de Forbin who purchased it for the museum from Géricault's heirs after his death in 1824. The painting now dominates its gallery there. The display caption tells us that "the only hero in this poignant story is humanity".At some time between 1826 and 1830 American artist George Cooke (1793–1849) made a copy of the painting in a smaller size, (130.5 x 196.2 cm; approximately 4 ft × 6 ft), which was shown in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C. to crowds who knew about the controversy surrounding the shipwreck. Reviews favoured the painting, which also stimulated plays, poems, performances and a children's book.  It was bought by a former admiral, Uriah Phillips, who left it in 1862 to the New York Historical Society, where it was miscatalogued as by Gilbert Stuart and remained inaccessible until the mistake was uncovered in 2006, after an enquiry by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, a professor of art history at the University of Delaware.  The university's conservation department undertook restoration of the work.Because of deterioration in the condition of Géricault's original, the Louvre in 1859–60 commissioned two French artists, Pierre-Désiré Guillemet and Étienne-Antoine-Eugène Ronjat, to make a full size copy of the original for loan exhibitions.In the autumn of 1939, the Medusa was packed for removal from the Louvre in anticipation of the outbreak of war.  A scenery truck from the Comédie-Française transported the painting to Versailles in the night of 3 September.  Some time later, the Medusa was moved to the Château de Chambord where it remained until after the end of the Second World War.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: How does The Raft of the Medusa explain its Exhibition and reception?

The Raft of the Medusa was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, under the title Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene), although its real subject would have been unmistakable for contemporary viewers. The exhibition was sponsored by Louis XVIII and featured nearly 1,300 paintings, 208 sculptures and numerous other engravings and architectural designs. Géricault's canvas was the star at the exhibition: "It strikes and attracts all eyes" (Le Journal de Paris). Louis XVIII visited three days before the opening and reportedly said: "Monsieur, vous venez de faire un naufrage qui n'en est pas un pour vous", freely translated as "Monsieur Géricault, your shipwreck is certainly no disaster". The critics were divided: the horror and "terribilità" of the subject exercised fascination, but devotees of classicism expressed their distaste for what they described as a "pile of corpses", whose realism they considered a far cry from the "ideal beauty" represented by Girodet's Pygmalion and Galatea, which triumphed the same year. Géricault's work expressed a paradox: how could a hideous subject be translated into a powerful painting, how could the painter reconcile art and reality? Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie, a French painter and contemporary of Géricault, provided one answer: "Monsieur Géricault seems mistaken. The goal of painting is to speak to the soul and the eyes, not to repel." The painting had fervent admirers too, including French writer and art critic Auguste Jal, who praised its political theme, its liberal position–its advancement of the negro and critique of ultra-royalism–and its modernity. The historian Jules Michelet approved: "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa".Géricault had deliberately sought to be both politically and artistically confrontational. Critics responded to his aggressive approach in kind, and their reactions were either ones of revulsion or praise, depending on whether the writer's sympathies favoured the Bourbon or Liberal viewpoint. The painting was seen as largely sympathetic to the men on the raft, and thus by extension to the anti-imperial cause adopted by the survivors Savigny and Corréard. The decision to place a black man at the pinnacle of the composition was a controversial expression of Géricault's abolitionist sympathies. The art critic Christine Riding has speculated that the painting's later exhibition in London was planned to coincide with anti-slavery agitation there. According to art critic and curator Karen Wilkin, Géricault's painting acts as a "cynical indictment of the bungling malfeasance of France's post-Napoleonic officialdom, much of which was recruited from the surviving families of the Ancien Régime".The painting generally impressed the viewing public, although its subject matter repelled many, thus denying Géricault the popular acclaim which he had hoped to achieve. At the end of the exhibition, the painting was awarded a gold medal by the judging panel, but they did not give the work the greater prestige of selecting it for the Louvre's national collection. Instead, Géricault was awarded a commission on the subject of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he clandestinely offered to Delacroix, whose finished painting he then signed as his own. Géricault retreated to the countryside, where he collapsed from exhaustion, and his unsold work was rolled up and stored in a friend's studio.Géricault arranged for the painting to be exhibited in London in 1820, where it was shown at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, from 10 June until the end of the year, and viewed by about 40,000 visitors. The reception in London was more positive than that in Paris, and the painting was hailed as representative of a new direction in French art. It received more positive reviews than when it was shown at the Salon. In part, this was due to the manner of the painting's exhibition: in Paris it had initially been hung high in the Salon Carré—a mistake that Géricault recognised when he saw the work installed—but in London it was placed close to the ground, emphasising its monumental impact. There may have been other reasons for its popularity in England as well, including "a degree of national self-congratulation", the appeal of the painting as lurid entertainment, and two theatrical entertainments based around the events on the raft which coincided with the exhibition and borrowed heavily from Géricault's depiction. From the London exhibition Géricault earned close to 20,000 francs, which was his share of the fees charged to visitors, and substantially more than he would have been paid had the French government purchased the work from him. After the London exhibition, Bullock brought the painting to Dublin early in 1821, but the exhibition there was far less successful, in large part due to a competing exhibition of a moving panorama, "The Wreck of the Medusa" by the Marshall brothers firm, which was said to have been painted under the direction of one of the survivors of the disaster.The Raft of the Medusa was championed by the curator of the Louvre, comte de Forbin who purchased it for the museum from Géricault's heirs after his death in 1824. The painting now dominates its gallery there. The display caption tells us that "the only hero in this poignant story is humanity".At some time between 1826 and 1830 American artist George Cooke (1793–1849) made a copy of the painting in a smaller size, (130.5 x 196.2 cm; approximately 4 ft × 6 ft), which was shown in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C. to crowds who knew about the controversy surrounding the shipwreck. Reviews favoured the painting, which also stimulated plays, poems, performances and a children's book.  It was bought by a former admiral, Uriah Phillips, who left it in 1862 to the New York Historical Society, where it was miscatalogued as by Gilbert Stuart and remained inaccessible until the mistake was uncovered in 2006, after an enquiry by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, a professor of art history at the University of Delaware.  The university's conservation department undertook restoration of the work.Because of deterioration in the condition of Géricault's original, the Louvre in 1859–60 commissioned two French artists, Pierre-Désiré Guillemet and Étienne-Antoine-Eugène Ronjat, to make a full size copy of the original for loan exhibitions.In the autumn of 1939, the Medusa was packed for removal from the Louvre in anticipation of the outbreak of war.  A scenery truck from the Comédie-Française transported the painting to Versailles in the night of 3 September.  Some time later, the Medusa was moved to the Château de Chambord where it remained until after the end of the Second World War.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: In The Raft of the Medusa, how is the Exhibition and reception discussed?

The Raft of the Medusa was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, under the title Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene), although its real subject would have been unmistakable for contemporary viewers. The exhibition was sponsored by Louis XVIII and featured nearly 1,300 paintings, 208 sculptures and numerous other engravings and architectural designs. Géricault's canvas was the star at the exhibition: "It strikes and attracts all eyes" (Le Journal de Paris). Louis XVIII visited three days before the opening and reportedly said: "Monsieur, vous venez de faire un naufrage qui n'en est pas un pour vous", freely translated as "Monsieur Géricault, your shipwreck is certainly no disaster". The critics were divided: the horror and "terribilità" of the subject exercised fascination, but devotees of classicism expressed their distaste for what they described as a "pile of corpses", whose realism they considered a far cry from the "ideal beauty" represented by Girodet's Pygmalion and Galatea, which triumphed the same year. Géricault's work expressed a paradox: how could a hideous subject be translated into a powerful painting, how could the painter reconcile art and reality? Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie, a French painter and contemporary of Géricault, provided one answer: "Monsieur Géricault seems mistaken. The goal of painting is to speak to the soul and the eyes, not to repel." The painting had fervent admirers too, including French writer and art critic Auguste Jal, who praised its political theme, its liberal position–its advancement of the negro and critique of ultra-royalism–and its modernity. The historian Jules Michelet approved: "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa".Géricault had deliberately sought to be both politically and artistically confrontational. Critics responded to his aggressive approach in kind, and their reactions were either ones of revulsion or praise, depending on whether the writer's sympathies favoured the Bourbon or Liberal viewpoint. The painting was seen as largely sympathetic to the men on the raft, and thus by extension to the anti-imperial cause adopted by the survivors Savigny and Corréard. The decision to place a black man at the pinnacle of the composition was a controversial expression of Géricault's abolitionist sympathies. The art critic Christine Riding has speculated that the painting's later exhibition in London was planned to coincide with anti-slavery agitation there. According to art critic and curator Karen Wilkin, Géricault's painting acts as a "cynical indictment of the bungling malfeasance of France's post-Napoleonic officialdom, much of which was recruited from the surviving families of the Ancien Régime".The painting generally impressed the viewing public, although its subject matter repelled many, thus denying Géricault the popular acclaim which he had hoped to achieve. At the end of the exhibition, the painting was awarded a gold medal by the judging panel, but they did not give the work the greater prestige of selecting it for the Louvre's national collection. Instead, Géricault was awarded a commission on the subject of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he clandestinely offered to Delacroix, whose finished painting he then signed as his own. Géricault retreated to the countryside, where he collapsed from exhaustion, and his unsold work was rolled up and stored in a friend's studio.Géricault arranged for the painting to be exhibited in London in 1820, where it was shown at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, from 10 June until the end of the year, and viewed by about 40,000 visitors. The reception in London was more positive than that in Paris, and the painting was hailed as representative of a new direction in French art. It received more positive reviews than when it was shown at the Salon. In part, this was due to the manner of the painting's exhibition: in Paris it had initially been hung high in the Salon Carré—a mistake that Géricault recognised when he saw the work installed—but in London it was placed close to the ground, emphasising its monumental impact. There may have been other reasons for its popularity in England as well, including "a degree of national self-congratulation", the appeal of the painting as lurid entertainment, and two theatrical entertainments based around the events on the raft which coincided with the exhibition and borrowed heavily from Géricault's depiction. From the London exhibition Géricault earned close to 20,000 francs, which was his share of the fees charged to visitors, and substantially more than he would have been paid had the French government purchased the work from him. After the London exhibition, Bullock brought the painting to Dublin early in 1821, but the exhibition there was far less successful, in large part due to a competing exhibition of a moving panorama, "The Wreck of the Medusa" by the Marshall brothers firm, which was said to have been painted under the direction of one of the survivors of the disaster.The Raft of the Medusa was championed by the curator of the Louvre, comte de Forbin who purchased it for the museum from Géricault's heirs after his death in 1824. The painting now dominates its gallery there. The display caption tells us that "the only hero in this poignant story is humanity".At some time between 1826 and 1830 American artist George Cooke (1793–1849) made a copy of the painting in a smaller size, (130.5 x 196.2 cm; approximately 4 ft × 6 ft), which was shown in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C. to crowds who knew about the controversy surrounding the shipwreck. Reviews favoured the painting, which also stimulated plays, poems, performances and a children's book.  It was bought by a former admiral, Uriah Phillips, who left it in 1862 to the New York Historical Society, where it was miscatalogued as by Gilbert Stuart and remained inaccessible until the mistake was uncovered in 2006, after an enquiry by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, a professor of art history at the University of Delaware.  The university's conservation department undertook restoration of the work.Because of deterioration in the condition of Géricault's original, the Louvre in 1859–60 commissioned two French artists, Pierre-Désiré Guillemet and Étienne-Antoine-Eugène Ronjat, to make a full size copy of the original for loan exhibitions.In the autumn of 1939, the Medusa was packed for removal from the Louvre in anticipation of the outbreak of war.  A scenery truck from the Comédie-Française transported the painting to Versailles in the night of 3 September.  Some time later, the Medusa was moved to the Château de Chambord where it remained until after the end of the Second World War.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: Focus on The Raft of the Medusa and explain the Interpretation and legacy.

In its insistence on portraying an unpleasant truth, The Raft of the Medusa was a landmark in the emerging Romantic movement in French painting, and "laid the foundations of an aesthetic revolution" against the prevailing Neoclassical style.  Géricault's compositional structure and depiction of the figures are classical, but the contrasting turbulence of the subject represents a significant change in artistic direction and creates an important bridge between Neoclassical and Romantic styles. By 1815, Jacques-Louis David, then in exile in Brussels, was both the leading proponent of the popular history painting genre, which he had perfected, and a master of the Neoclassical style. In France, both history painting and the Neoclassical style continued through the work of Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, François Gérard, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin—teacher of both Géricault and Delacroix—and other artists who remained committed to the artistic traditions of David and Nicolas Poussin.In his introduction to The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, Hubert Wellington wrote about Delacroix's opinion of the state of French painting just prior to the Salon of 1819. According to Wellington, "The curious blend of classic with realistic outlook which had been imposed by the discipline of David was now losing both animation and interest. The master himself was nearing his end, and exiled in Belgium. His most docile pupil, Girodet, a refined and cultivated classicist, was producing pictures of astonishing frigidity. Gérard, immensely successful painter of portraits under the Empire—some of them admirable—fell in with the new vogue for large pictures of history, but without enthusiasm."The Raft of the Medusa contains the gestures and grand scale of traditional history painting; however, it presents ordinary people, rather than heroes, reacting to the unfolding drama. Géricault's raft pointedly lacks a hero, and his painting presents no cause beyond sheer survival. The work represents, in the words of Christine Riding, "the fallacy of hope and pointless suffering, and at worst, the basic human instinct to survive, which had superseded all moral considerations and plunged civilised man into barbarism".The artist's abolitionist views are said to have been expressed in his decision to prominently feature at least two Black individuals, particularly the dominant figure seen waving a dark red handkerchief. According to scholars Klaus Berger and Diane Chalmers Johnson, Géricault made "him the focal point of the drama, the strongest and most perceptive of the survivors, in a sense, the 'hero of the scene.'" They argue that the artist's choice to do so was not a "last-minute" decision as evidenced by early sketches for the work, including a portrait study of the Haitian model Joseph, and point to Géricault's concerns regarding the "extreme cruelties" of illegal slave trade in the French colonies. Depicting a Black figure as a hero to convey an abolitionist message was uncommon at the time, as the official symbol of the French abolitionist group, the Société des amis des Noirs, was an emblem, originally created by Josiah Wedgewood, titled “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” (or “Ne suis-je pas ton frere?”) that depicts a Black man begging on one knee for liberation. Scholar Susan Libby highlights how this trope of a helpless, subservient slave became commonplace in European art. Gericault’s choice to place the Black man as the active “hero” deviated from popular ideas about enslaved people. The subject of marine tragedy was undertaken by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), who, like many English artists, probably saw Géricault's painting when it was exhibited in London in 1820. His A Disaster at Sea (c. 1835) chronicled a similar incident, this time a British catastrophe, with a swamped vessel and dying figures also placed in the foreground. Placing a person of color in the centre of the drama was revisited by Turner, with similar abolitionist overtones, in his The Slave Ship (1840).The unblemished musculature of the central figure waving to the rescue ship is reminiscent of the Neoclassical, however the naturalism of light and shadow, the authenticity of the desperation shown by the survivors and the emotional character of the composition differentiate it from Neoclassical austerity. It was a further departure from the religious or classical themes of earlier works because it depicted contemporary events with ordinary and unheroic figures. Both the choice of subject matter and the heightened manner in which the dramatic moment is depicted are typical of Romantic painting—strong indications of the extent to which Géricault had moved from the prevalent Neoclassical movement.Hubert Wellington said that while Delacroix was a lifelong admirer of Gros, the dominating enthusiasm of his youth was for Géricault. The dramatic composition of Géricault, with its strong contrasts of tone and unconventional gestures, stimulated Delacroix to trust his own creative impulses on a large work. Delacroix said, "Géricault allowed me to see his Raft of Medusa while he was still working on it." The painting's influence is seen in Delacroix's The Barque of Dante (1822) and reappears as inspiration in Delacroix's later works, such as The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840).According to Wellington, Delacroix's masterpiece of 1830, Liberty Leading the People, springs directly from Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's own Massacre at Chios. Wellington wrote that "While Géricault carried his interest in actual detail to the point of searching for more survivors from the wreck as models, Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions."The art historian Albert Elsen believed that The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's  Massacre at Chios provided the inspiration for the grandiose sweep of Auguste Rodin's monumental sculpture The Gates of Hell. He wrote that "Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and Géricault's Raft of the Medusa confronted Rodin on a heroic scale with the innocent nameless victims of political tragedies ... If Rodin was inspired to rival Michelangelo's Last Judgment, he had Géricault's Raft of the Medusa in front of him for encouragement."While Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) could be described as an anti-Romantic painter, his major works like A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) and The Artist's Studio (1855) owe a debt to The Raft of the Medusa. The influence is not only in Courbet's enormous scale, but in his willingness to portray ordinary people and current political events, and to record people, places and events in real, everyday surroundings. The 2004 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute,  Bonjour Monsieur Courbet: The Bruyas Collection from the Musee Fabre, Montpellier, sought to compare the 19th-century Realist painters Courbet, Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), and early Édouard Manet (1832–1883) with artists associated with Romanticism, including Géricault and Delacroix. Citing The Raft of the Medusa as an instrumental influence on Realism, the exhibition drew comparisons between all of the artists. The critic Michael Fried sees Manet directly borrowing the figure of the man cradling his son for the composition of Angels at the Tomb of Christ.The influence of The Raft of the Medusa was felt by artists beyond France. Francis Danby, a British painter born in Ireland, probably was inspired by Géricault's picture when he painted Sunset at Sea after a Storm in 1824, and wrote in 1829 that The Raft of the Medusa was "the finest and grandest historical picture I have ever seen".The Gulf Stream (1899), by the American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910), replicates the composition of The Raft of the Medusa with a damaged vessel, ominously surrounded by sharks and threatened by a waterspout. Like Géricault, Homer makes a black man the pivotal figure in the scene, though here he is the vessel's sole occupant. A ship in the distance mirrors the Argus from Géricault's painting. The move from the drama of Romanticism to the new Realism is exemplified by the stoic resignation of Homer's figure. The man's condition, which in earlier works might have been characterised by hope or helplessness, has turned to "sullen rage".In the early 1990s, the American sculptor John Connell, in his Raft Project, a collaborative project with painter Eugene Newmann, recreated The Raft of the Medusa by making life-sized sculptures out of wood, paper and tar and placing them on a large wooden raft.Remarking on the contrast between the dying figures in the foreground and the figures in the mid-ground waving towards the approaching rescue ship, the French art historian Georges-Antoine Borias wrote that Géricault's painting represents, "on the one hand, desolation and death. On the other, hope and life."For Kenneth Clark, The Raft of the Medusa "remains the chief example of romantic pathos expressed through the nude; and that obsession with death, which drove Géricault to frequent mortuary chambers and places of public execution, gives truth to his figures of the dead and the dying. Their outlines may be taken from the classics, but they have been seen again with a craving for violent experience."Today, a bronze bas-relief of The Raft of the Medusa by Antoine Étex adorns Géricault's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg


The Raft of the Medusa

Prompt: Explain the Interpretation and legacy of this artwork, The Raft of the Medusa.

In its insistence on portraying an unpleasant truth, The Raft of the Medusa was a landmark in the emerging Romantic movement in French painting, and "laid the foundations of an aesthetic revolution" against the prevailing Neoclassical style.  Géricault's compositional structure and depiction of the figures are classical, but the contrasting turbulence of the subject represents a significant change in artistic direction and creates an important bridge between Neoclassical and Romantic styles. By 1815, Jacques-Louis David, then in exile in Brussels, was both the leading proponent of the popular history painting genre, which he had perfected, and a master of the Neoclassical style. In France, both history painting and the Neoclassical style continued through the work of Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, François Gérard, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin—teacher of both Géricault and Delacroix—and other artists who remained committed to the artistic traditions of David and Nicolas Poussin.In his introduction to The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, Hubert Wellington wrote about Delacroix's opinion of the state of French painting just prior to the Salon of 1819. According to Wellington, "The curious blend of classic with realistic outlook which had been imposed by the discipline of David was now losing both animation and interest. The master himself was nearing his end, and exiled in Belgium. His most docile pupil, Girodet, a refined and cultivated classicist, was producing pictures of astonishing frigidity. Gérard, immensely successful painter of portraits under the Empire—some of them admirable—fell in with the new vogue for large pictures of history, but without enthusiasm."The Raft of the Medusa contains the gestures and grand scale of traditional history painting; however, it presents ordinary people, rather than heroes, reacting to the unfolding drama. Géricault's raft pointedly lacks a hero, and his painting presents no cause beyond sheer survival. The work represents, in the words of Christine Riding, "the fallacy of hope and pointless suffering, and at worst, the basic human instinct to survive, which had superseded all moral considerations and plunged civilised man into barbarism".The artist's abolitionist views are said to have been expressed in his decision to prominently feature at least two Black individuals, particularly the dominant figure seen waving a dark red handkerchief. According to scholars Klaus Berger and Diane Chalmers Johnson, Géricault made "him the focal point of the drama, the strongest and most perceptive of the survivors, in a sense, the 'hero of the scene.'" They argue that the artist's choice to do so was not a "last-minute" decision as evidenced by early sketches for the work, including a portrait study of the Haitian model Joseph, and point to Géricault's concerns regarding the "extreme cruelties" of illegal slave trade in the French colonies. Depicting a Black figure as a hero to convey an abolitionist message was uncommon at the time, as the official symbol of the French abolitionist group, the Société des amis des Noirs, was an emblem, originally created by Josiah Wedgewood, titled “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” (or “Ne suis-je pas ton frere?”) that depicts a Black man begging on one knee for liberation. Scholar Susan Libby highlights how this trope of a helpless, subservient slave became commonplace in European art. Gericault’s choice to place the Black man as the active “hero” deviated from popular ideas about enslaved people. The subject of marine tragedy was undertaken by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), who, like many English artists, probably saw Géricault's painting when it was exhibited in London in 1820. His A Disaster at Sea (c. 1835) chronicled a similar incident, this time a British catastrophe, with a swamped vessel and dying figures also placed in the foreground. Placing a person of color in the centre of the drama was revisited by Turner, with similar abolitionist overtones, in his The Slave Ship (1840).The unblemished musculature of the central figure waving to the rescue ship is reminiscent of the Neoclassical, however the naturalism of light and shadow, the authenticity of the desperation shown by the survivors and the emotional character of the composition differentiate it from Neoclassical austerity. It was a further departure from the religious or classical themes of earlier works because it depicted contemporary events with ordinary and unheroic figures. Both the choice of subject matter and the heightened manner in which the dramatic moment is depicted are typical of Romantic painting—strong indications of the extent to which Géricault had moved from the prevalent Neoclassical movement.Hubert Wellington said that while Delacroix was a lifelong admirer of Gros, the dominating enthusiasm of his youth was for Géricault. The dramatic composition of Géricault, with its strong contrasts of tone and unconventional gestures, stimulated Delacroix to trust his own creative impulses on a large work. Delacroix said, "Géricault allowed me to see his Raft of Medusa while he was still working on it." The painting's influence is seen in Delacroix's The Barque of Dante (1822) and reappears as inspiration in Delacroix's later works, such as The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840).According to Wellington, Delacroix's masterpiece of 1830, Liberty Leading the People, springs directly from Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's own Massacre at Chios. Wellington wrote that "While Géricault carried his interest in actual detail to the point of searching for more survivors from the wreck as models, Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions."The art historian Albert Elsen believed that The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's  Massacre at Chios provided the inspiration for the grandiose sweep of Auguste Rodin's monumental sculpture The Gates of Hell. He wrote that "Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and Géricault's Raft of the Medusa confronted Rodin on a heroic scale with the innocent nameless victims of political tragedies ... If Rodin was inspired to rival Michelangelo's Last Judgment, he had Géricault's Raft of the Medusa in front of him for encouragement."While Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) could be described as an anti-Romantic painter, his major works like A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) and The Artist's Studio (1855) owe a debt to The Raft of the Medusa. The influence is not only in Courbet's enormous scale, but in his willingness to portray ordinary people and current political events, and to record people, places and events in real, everyday surroundings. The 2004 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute,  Bonjour Monsieur Courbet: The Bruyas Collection from the Musee Fabre, Montpellier, sought to compare the 19th-century Realist painters Courbet, Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), and early Édouard Manet (1832–1883) with artists associated with Romanticism, including Géricault and Delacroix. Citing The Raft of the Medusa as an instrumental influence on Realism, the exhibition drew comparisons between all of the artists. The critic Michael Fried sees Manet directly borrowing the figure of the man cradling his son for the composition of Angels at the Tomb of Christ.The influence of The Raft of the Medusa was felt by artists beyond France. Francis Danby, a British painter born in Ireland, probably was inspired by Géricault's picture when he painted Sunset at Sea after a Storm in 1824, and wrote in 1829 that The Raft of the Medusa was "the finest and grandest historical picture I have ever seen".The Gulf Stream (1899), by the American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910), replicates the composition of The Raft of the Medusa with a damaged vessel, ominously surrounded by sharks and threatened by a waterspout. Like Géricault, Homer makes a black man the pivotal figure in the scene, though here he is the vessel's sole occupant. A ship in the distance mirrors the Argus from Géricault's painting. The move from the drama of Romanticism to the new Realism is exemplified by the stoic resignation of Homer's figure. The man's condition, which in earlier works might have been characterised by hope or helplessness, has turned to "sullen rage".In the early 1990s, the American sculptor John Connell, in his Raft Project, a collaborative project with painter Eugene Newmann, recreated The Raft of the Medusa by making life-sized sculptures out of wood, paper and tar and placing them on a large wooden raft.Remarking on the contrast between the dying figures in the foreground and the figures in the mid-ground waving towards the approaching rescue ship, the French art historian Georges-Antoine Borias wrote that Géricault's painting represents, "on the one hand, desolation and death. On the other, hope and life."For Kenneth Clark, The Raft of the Medusa "remains the chief example of romantic pathos expressed through the nude; and that obsession with death, which drove Géricault to frequent mortuary chambers and places of public execution, gives truth to his figures of the dead and the dying. Their outlines may be taken from the classics, but they have been seen again with a craving for violent experience."Today, a bronze bas-relief of The Raft of the Medusa by Antoine Étex adorns Géricault's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

File:The Medusa shown at the Louvre, in color.jpg

Detail of the crew member waving his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention

Géricault's ''Study for "The Raft of the Medusa"'', pen and brown ink, 17.6 cm × 24.5 cm, [[Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

1818-19}}, Getty Center. Joseph served as model for at least two Black individuals in the final version of the artist's representation of Medusa's raft.

Sailors of the ''Méduse'' detained by the British after the sinking. They were returned to France afterwards.{{sfn

File:Portrait Study by Théodore Géricault, c. 1818-19, Getty Center.JPG

File:Pierre-Paul Prud'hon - Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime.JPG

File:Raft-of-the-Medusa-copy par Pierre-Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat.jpg

Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

The main 16 colours used for the painting<ref name=christiansen/>

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa

Nicolas Sebastien Maillot's ''Raft of the Medusa shown in Salon Carré of the Louvre'', 1831, [[Louvre

Plan of the ''Medusa'''s raft at the moment of its crew's rescue<ref>Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. ''Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France''. [[Yale University Press

Diagram showing the outline of the two pyramidal structures that form the basis of the work. The position of the Argus rescue vessel is indicated by the yellow dot.

In 1820, Géricault successfully exhibited the painting in the [[Egyptian Hall

École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers

alt=darkly shaded painting of two winged angels chasing man who runs away from a fallen, naked body

File:Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse esquisse (salon de 1819).jpg

The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782

Copy of the work by [[Pierre-Désiré Guillemet

File:Raft of Méduse-Alexandre Corréard-IMG 4788-cropped.JPG

''Portrait Study of Joseph'', oil on canvas painting by Théodore Géricault, {{Circa

Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa

Category:Paintings in the Louvre by French artists

File:Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 1815 edited.jpg

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures

''Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa'', crayon, ink wash, and gouache on paper, 28 cm × 38 cm, [[Louvre

Category:Paintings by Théodore Géricault

File:Théodore Géricault "The raft of the Medusa".jpg

:File:Ugolino and his Sons Starving to Death in the Tower 1806 1a.jpg