Each Théodore Géricault oil painting is hand-painted with oil on linen canvas, created by one of HandmadePiece's professional painters. Museum quality with preview before shipment. Global free shipping.
1791 - 1824 • French • Painter • Romantic
"If obstacles discourage the mediocre talent, they are, on the contrary, the necessary food of genius; they ripen and exalt it, where the easy road would leave it cold. Everything that opposes the triumphant progress of genius irritates it, and induces that fever of exaltation that overthrows and conquers all to produce its masterpieces . ... Unfortunately, the Academy does better: it snuffs out those who have some sf1arks of the sacred fire." - Théodore Géricault
An admirer of Jacques -Louis DAVID, whom he called "the most distinguished of our artists," Gericault held opinions on the subject of the ACADEMY that resembled those of David. Gericault had both a ROMANTIC and, apparently, a reformist zeal. His best-known work, Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), is a melodramatic representation of a contemporary event. Afloat in a turbulent ocean, the raft is crowded with survivors of a French ship, the Medusa, which foundered off the west coast of Africa in 1816. Mismanagement of the ship, for which the government was deemed responsible, became a political controversy, as did Gericault's painting. He painted neither the cannibalism, the mutiny , nor the final rescue, but instead chose a moment of high tension and false hope-a ship in the distance passing by without seeing the raft. Gericault interviewed survivors, and his reportorial research was unprecedented. Compositionally, the figures of survivors and corpses form an X, with a black African waving a piece of white cloth at the top of one diagonal. Each figure seems to be matched by another that mirrors its pose: a man on his back counterbalanced by one on his stomach, the man standing at the peak, waving his flag, by another at the bottom, sitting despondently. Gericault's interest in human suffering also drove him to explore the faces of madness-the individual's loss of reason in an era once, but no longer, known as the Age of Reason. As did GOYA and others, he visited institutions for the insane and studied hospital inmates-he, himself, was a patient for a while. Scientific and artistic curiosity merged during the Romantic period, though at times ( e.g., when Gericault studied heads severed by the guillotine) it is difficult to disentangle morbidity from intellectual inquiry. In another context , Gericault' s paintings of horses are still unmatched for the intensity of their movement, alarm, and fury. The comment quoted above is excerpted from a manuscript found among Gericault 's effects after his early death, at 33, resulting from a riding accident.