Active Years: 1791-1824

Position: French painter and lithographer who painted modern subjects at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Career Highlights: Charging Chasseur, 1812 (Louvre, Paris); Wounded Cuirassier Leaving the Field of Battle, 1814 (Louvre, Paris); Start of the Race of the Barberi Horses, 1817 (Walter’s Art Gallery, Baltimore); Raft of the Medusa, 1819 (Louvre, Paris).

Scouting Report: Theodore Gericault’s career lasted only twelve years, during which time he lived and worked in France, Italy and England, exhibited only three paintings and struggled to find a way to depict current events in a grand and believable manner. He felt that neither neoclassicism nor romanticism had successfully achieved the type of realism he imagined. His masterpiece, the Raft of the Medusa, is the work that most fully exhibits his ideals by combining aspects of both styles. The painting was based on a shipwreck that occurred a few years earlier and was discussed widely in newspapers. Only fifteen of the original 149 passengers on the lifeboat survived a twelve day ordeal at sea that regressed to mutiny and cannibalism. Gericault depicts the despair and emotion occurring at the precise moment when the passengers fail to attract the attention of a distant rescue boat. The work was championed by Gericault’s followers during the nineteenth century, with the neoclassicists admiring the composition, the romantics appreciating the emotion and the realists lauding the handling of a contemporary subject.

Teammates and Contemporaries: Eugene Delacroix, John Constable, Francesco Goya, J.M.W. Turner.

Fun Fact: As an enlisted Musketeer, Gericault escorted King Louis XVIII to the Belgian border when Napoleon came out of exile in 1815. For the remaining Hundred Days until Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo, the artist was forced to remain in hiding.