The Founder of Modern Art?
Born This Day Series, Social Media Content
Gericault, by Horace Vernet
Born this day 1791, the French painter Théodore Géricault, best known for his epic painting The Raft of the Medusa, which depicts the horror of the most infamous shipwreck of the Age of Sail.
In 1816, the French Navy’s 40-gun frigate Méduse set sail for Africa, carrying a load of gold and 400 passengers, including the officials who were to meant to reclaim Senegal from the British. The captain was Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a one-time officer who hadn’t been on a ship in 20 years; Louis XVIII had given him the post as a reward for supporting the monarchy after the Bourbon Restoration.
Ignoring warnings from senior crew members, Chaumareys sailed too fast and too close to the shore. At Mauritania, the Medusa struck a sandbank and was held fast. She could have been re-floated but Chaumareys refused to jettison the cannon. And he’d only outfitted the ship with lifeboats for 250. So he ordered that a raft be built. He left 17 men to protect the gold and the rest set out, with the raft towed by two lifeboats. A storm hit, and the people in the lifeboats cut the tow ropes, leaving 147 people clinging to the raft, with no food, water, shelter or method of steering. As the raft drifted into the Atlantic, its passengers quickly began to die, by drowning, suicide, shark attack and murder.
Two weeks later, 15 people remained and were rescued, although some were past saving. Chaumareys still wanted his gold, and sent a salvage crew back to the site. The Méduse was largely intact but, after 54 days, three of the men were alive. Altogether, 13 men made it back to France.
Two of those men, an officer and a surgeon, wrote a detailed book about the ordeal. It was a best-seller, and the public learned of the government’s attempts to cover up the incident, and that, instead of receiving the customary death penalty, Chaumareys was sentenced to three years in jail.
The world was horrified. Géricault had to paint it.
One survivor was the ship’s carpenter—the man who’d built the raft. Géricault hired him to build a scale model of the Méduse. He also visited the morgue to sketch bodies, and brought body parts back to his studio. (Friends posed for him; the man face-down at the front of the painting is Eugène Delacroix.) In just 18 months, The Raft of the Medusa was complete, and was put on display at the Paris Salon in 1819. It caused a sensation, and deep embarrassment to the government, leading to the Saint-Cyr Law mandating that French military promotions be awarded solely on merit.
Géricault was greatly encouraged. He turned his sights to the plight of the insane, beginning work on a series depicting how they were housed and treated. He didn’t get far; he had tuberculosis and died at 33. While he is known as one of the founders of the Romantic movement, his oeuvre, especially The Raft of the Medusa, has led many art historians to consider him the founding figure of modern art.