After Géricault’s return to Paris in the autumn of 1817, he briefly continued to experiment with the timeless heroic subjects that had absorbed him in Rome. However, the politically charged atmosphere in Paris at the time soon turned his interest to capturing the drama of contemporary life. He sought to represent exemplary acts of courage or endurance taken from the history of the recent wars, in the grand pictorial style that the Old Masters had treated classical and mythological themes.
The crowning result of these efforts was his epic Raft of the Medusa (Paris, Louvre), which caused a sensation at the Salon of 1819. The huge canvas (4.91 m × 7.16 m) represents the aftermath of a shipwreck that, three years earlier, had violently agitated public opinion in France. Géricault was initially attracted to this subject because of the sensational nature of its story and controversiality. However, his rendition is more a humanitarian statement than a piece of pictorial reportage. He put the emphasis on the suffering and struggle of men abandoned to the forces of nature, rather than the scandalous circumstances of the disaster. In doing so, he infused a newspaper story with the tragic power of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement or Dante’s Inferno.
Géricault’s creative process is laid out in his preparatory drawings, such as the present sheet. Through them he explored the successive episodes of the narrative: the outbreaks of mutiny, cannibalism on the raft, the victims’ first inconclusive sighting of the distant rescue vessel, and the final rescue of the few survivors. The ten or so surviving compositional studies for the Raft of the Medusa make it possible to follow the development of Géricault's masterpiece step by step and the successive changes in the composition.
These two drawings mark an important moment in the production of the Louvre painting. In them, Géricault tightens the framing to show only the raft itself in the foreground, which emphasises the dramatic aspect of the scene.
On the verso of this sheet there is a nude study of a man, seen from behind, lying down and attempting to stand up.
Philippe Grunchec has confirmed the attribution of this drawing on the basis of a photograph.
Provenance
Hippolyte Walferdin (1795–1880), Paris, before 1845
Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 12th–16th April 1880, no. 292 (“Étude pour la Méduse. Dessin à l'encre rehaussé de blanc & Étude également pour la composition de la Méduse”, lots 91 and 93)
With Claude Aubry, Paris, 1964
Alain Delon Collection, Paris, to 2023
Exhibitions
Galerie Aubry, Paris, Géricault, 1964, no. 77, ill.
County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Géricault, 1971–1972, no. 81, ill. (recto)
Didier Imbert Fine Art, Paris, 20 ans de Passion: Alain Delon, Dessins, Printemps, 1990, no. 43, ill. (recto et verso)
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, Géricault; La folie d'un monde, 2006, no. 79, repr. p. 149 (recto)
Publications
C. Blanc, Histoire des peintres français au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1845, vol. I, pp. 427–428 and 442
C. Clément, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1867, dessins no. 104
C. Clément, Géricault. Étude biographique et critique avec le catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre du maître, Paris, 1868 and 1879, dessins no. 115
R. Rey, “Géricault ou l'archange aboli”, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 12 November 1964, p. 8, ill. (verso)
J. Fischer, “Géricault in French Private Collections”, The Connoisseur, January 1965, p. 52
L. Eitner, “Reversals of Direction in Géricault's Compositional Subjects”, in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes, Berlin, 1967, vol. III, p. 133, note 19
L. Eitner, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, London, 1972, no. 20, pp. 149–150, fig. 18 (recto) and 60 (verso)
L. Eitner, Supplément au catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre de Géricault, by C. Clément, Paris, 1973, no. 406, p. 466
L. Eitner, Géricault. His Life and Work, London, 1983, pp. 173, 343, note 102
P. Grunchec, Master Drawings by Géricault, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library and others, 1985–1986, p. 153, no. 80, ill. (verso)
G. Bazin, Théodore Géricault. Étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1994, vol. VI (Le Radeau de la Méduse et les Monomanes), nos. 1964 and 1981, pp. 19, 23, 116–117 and 124, ill. (recto and verso)
T. Buck, Géricaults Floss der Medusa 1819–2019, Würzburg, 2019, p. 38, fig. 16
