The Raft of the Medusa Painting is an oil painting of 1818-19 by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), housed in the Louvre, Paris. Completed when the artist was just 26, the work is an icon of French Romanticism. At 491 × 717 cm, it is an extremely large painting which renders the human figures as life-sized.
In both choice of subject matter and dramatic presentation of a single moment, the work indicates Géricault's break from the coolness and calm of the then prevailing neoclassical school.
The Raft of the Medusa depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate "Méduse", which ran aground off of the coast of today's Mauritania on 5 July 1816.
A limited number of lifeboats were available on board, and 147 passengers were forced onto a raft which was eventually abandoned by the other crew. The raft floated for 13 days, during which time most of its occupants died. Before the survivors were rescued on 17 July, they suffered from starvation, dehydration and madness.
The disaster caused a huge scandal, and its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain, who had been granted his post in an act of political favour by the court of the recently restored French monarchy.
In choosing the tragedy as subject matter for his first major work, an uncommissioned depiction of an event from recent history, Géricault consciously selected a well known event that would generate huge public interest and help launch his career.
The painting proved highly controversial at its first appearance in the 1819 Salon, and as the artist had calculated, The Raft of the Medusa attracted passionate praise and condemnation in equal measure. Scholars have generally attributed two indented meanings to the work; and in the words of the art historian Georges-Antoine Borias, Géricault's Medusa represents "on the one hand, desolation and death.
On the other, hope and life."
The display caption in the Louvre tells us that "the only hero in this poignant story is humanity".
In June 1816, the French naval ship The Medusa set sail leading three other ships; the storeship Loire, the brig Argus and the corvette Écho, for the Senegalese port of Saint-Louis.
Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys was appointed capitaine de frégate even though he had hardly sailed in 20 years.
Carrying passengers, including the appointed French governor of Senegal , Colonel Julien-Désire Schmaltz and his wife Reine Schmaltz, the frigate's mission was to repossess the former French colony.
The Medusa's complement totaled 400, including 160 crew. In an effort to make time, the ship overtook the other three, but in its haste drifted 100 miles off course and eventually on July 2 drove on to a sandbank off the West African coast near today's Mauritania.
The cause of the collision has been widely blamed on the incompetent actions of the Medusa's captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys, a repatriated noble. de Chaumereys lacked authority and experience, and had been granted his post in an act of political preferment.
After efforts to free the frigate failed by 5 July the frightened passengers and crew opted to try to reach the African coast only 60 miles away.
There was space for only 250 passengers on the ship's lifeboats, and the remaining passengers 146 men and one woman were piled onto a half submerged raft with only a few caskets of wine as sustenance. Seventeen crew members opted to stay aboard the grounded Medusa.
The crew intended to tow the raft, but after only a few miles realised it was impractical, and decided to cut it loose.
After thirteen days, on July 17, 1816, the raft was rescued by the Argus by chance no search effort was made by the French.
By this time only 15 passengers were still alive; the others having died of hunger or starvation; having only wine and human flesh to survive on.
The incident became a huge public embarrassment to the French monarchy, who had only been recently restored to power after Napoleon's defeat in 1815.
Until 1818, Géricault had not yet found his artistic voice.
He was an admirer of Peter Paul Rubens and Antoine-Jean Gros, and while his first exhibited work, 1812's The Charging Chasseur, owes a debt to Rubens in its ambitious and monumental scale, it also indicates an interest in the depiction of contemporary subject matter.
By the age of 25, Géricault had travelled and been witness to victims of both insanity and plague. From what he saw, he became haunted by the stiffness of corpses.
The structure of the composition and classical depiction of the figures are in contrast to the turbulence of the subject, and create an important bridge between neo-classical and romantic styles.
The painting fuses many influences, both old master and contemporary: the Last Judgment of Michelangelo, the monumental approach to contemporary events by Antoine-Jean Gros, figure groupings by Henry Fuseli, and possibly the painting Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley.
The foreground figure of the older man may be a reference to Ugolino from Dante's Inferno, a subject that Géricault had contemplated painting. At any rate, reviewers were quick to make the connection.
Like Gros, Géricault had seen and felt the exhilaration of violence, but was distraught by the human consequences.Géricault was captivated by accounts of the widely publicised 1816 shipwreck, and realised that a depiction of the event might be an opportunity to establish his reputation as a painter.
Having decided to proceed, he went to extraordinary lengths to make his work as realistic as he could. In 1818, he contacted the authors of published accounts, and later made sketches of bodies in the morgue of the Hospital Beaujon, and even brought severed limbs back his studio to study their decay.
Behind locked doors he threw himself into his work. Nothing repulsed him. He was dreaded and avoided".
Although he was suffering fever at the time, he travelled to the coast on a number of occasions to witness storms breaking on the shore, and a visit to artists in England afforded further opportunity to study ocean and sky while crossing the English Channel.
The painting depicts a moment recounted by one of the survivors: prior to their rescue, the passengers saw a ship on the horizon (visible in the upper right of the painting), which they attempted to signal. The ship, however, passed by.
In the words of one of the surviving crew members, "From the delirium of joy, we fell into profound despondency and grief".
The ship, the Argus, reappeared two hours later and rescued those who remained.
The painting was a political statement the incompetent captain was an inexperienced but politically sound anti-Bonapartist and an artistic achievement that galvanized romantic painting and led to a break from the neoclassical style.
The work was realized on the epic scale of a history painting, yet for the first time in France it was based on a current news story.
The unblemished musculature of the central figure, waving to the supposed rescue ship, is reminiscent of the neoclassical, but the painting is broadly romantic. The naturalism of light and shadow, authenticity of the haggard bodies, and emotional character of the composition, differentiate it from neoclassical austerity.
The Raft of the Medusa was a further departure from the religious or classical themes of earlier works because it depicted contemporary events with ordinary and unheroic figures. The ragged state of the figures' clothes allowed the "unromantic" nature of modern dress to be largely bypassed.
Gericault undertook extensive research before he began to work on the painting.
In early 1818, he met with the survivors Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard, and their emotional descriptions of their experiences largely inspired the tone of the final painting.
The work's conception proved slow and difficult for Géricault, and he struggled to decide on a single pictorially effective moment to best capture the inherent drama of the wreck. He drew numerous preparatory sketches while deciding which of several alternative moments of the disaster he would depict in the final work.
For these, the artist used friends as models, most notably the painter Eugène Delacroix who modelled for the figure in the foreground whose face is turned downward and whose arms are outstretched. Two of the raft's ten survivors, Savigny and Correard both of whom Géricault talked with at great length before composing the scene are seen in shadow at the foot of the mast.
Géricault also commissioned model replicas of the ships, and to achieve the most authentic rendering of the flesh tones of the dead, studied corpses in nearby morgues.
Géricault said, "Michelangelo sent shivers up my spine, these lost souls destroying each other inevitably conjure up the tragic grandeur of the Sistine Chapel".
In the end, Géricault settled on the moment when the survivors first see the approaching rescue ship. Working with little distraction, Géricault completed the massive painting in eight months.
Both the choice of subject matter, and the heightened manner in which the dramatic moment is depicted are typical of Romantic painting, a strong indication of the extent to which Géricault had moved from the then prevailing neoclassical movement.
The Raft of the Medusa describes the scene when after 13 days adrift, the remaining 15 survivors see a ship appear in the distance. The men on the raft are shown to be in utter despair.
One old man holds the corpse of his son at his knees, while another is shown tearing his hair out in frustration and defeat. A number of dead bodies litter the foreground, waiting to be swept away by the surrounding waves.
The men in the background have just spotted a rescue ship; one man points it out to another, while an African crew member stands on an empty barrel and frantically waves his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention.
The work is built upon two pyramidal structures. The perimeter of the mast on the left triangle forms the first. The horizontal grouping of dead and dying figures in the foreground forms the base from which the survivors emerge, surging upward towards the emotional peak, the central figure shown waving desperately at a rescue ship.
The viewer's attention is first drawn into the centre of the canvas, then follows the directional flow of the survivors' bodies, viewed from behind and straining to the right.
Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figuresThe raft is shown as very unstable as it rides the wide and deep waves. Two diagonal lines are used to heighten the dramatic tension.
One follows the mast and its rigging and leads the viewer's eye towards an approaching wave which threatens to engulf the raft, while the second, composed of reaching figures, leads to the distant silhouette of The Argus, the ship that eventually rescued the survivors.
It's palette is composed of pallid flesh tones and the murky colours of the survivors' clothes, the sea and the clouds.
Overall the painting is dark and relies largely on the use of sombre dark, mostly brown pigments which Géricault believed was effective in suggesting tragedy and pain.
The colourisation is for the most part largely monotonous, and even his treatment of the sea is muted, being rendered in dark greens rather than the deep blues which could have afforded contrast to the tones of the raft and its figures.
From the distant area of the rescue ship a bright light shines to brighten a scene otherwise depicted in dull browns.
The Raft of the Medusa was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon.
The exhibition was overseen by the French king Louis XVIII and featured about 1,300 individual paintings, 208 sculptures and numerous other engravings and architectural designs.
Géricault deliberately sought to be confrontational, both politically and artistically.
The critics responded in kind, and the reaction was either one of revulsion or praise, depending on whether the writer's sympathies favoured the Bourbon or the 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 Savigny and Correard.
The decision to place a black man at the pinnacle of the composition would have been controversial, and was an expression of Géricault's abolitionist sympathies.
It has been suggested that the painting's subsequent exhibition in London was planned to coincide with anti-slavery agitation there.
Following the painting's reception in Paris, Géricault retreated to the countryside, where he collapsed from exhaustion.
The painting was awarded a gold medal by the French, but having found no buyer, 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 a private venue from June 10 until the end of the year, and was seen 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.
In part this was due to the way in which the painting was exhibited: in Paris it had initially been hung high in the Salon Carré, a mistake which Géricault recognised when he saw the work installed, but in London it was placed close to the ground, emphasizing its monumental impact.
From the London exhibition Géricault earned close to 20,000 francs, 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.
Perhaps the most dramatic, and ultimately prescient response to the painting was provided by Delacroix, who would become the standard-bearer of French romanticism after Géricault's death.
Upon seeing the work in progress, he recorded that the "impression it gave me was so strong that, as I left the studio, I broke into a run, and kept running like a fool all the way back...to the far end of the faubourg Saint-Germain."
The Raft of the Medusa was championed by the curator of the Louvre, comte de Forbin, and was purchased for the Louvre from Géricault's heirs after his death in 1824.
The painting dominates its gallery in the Louvre: its wall-sized scale of 491 × 717 cm means that the figures rendered are life-sized.
A bronze bas-relief of the painting adorns Géricault's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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