Theodore Gericault, the Raft of The Medusa.
In recent years researchers have been trying to establishing the timeline of Theodore Gericault most controversial project, the Raft of the Medusa. Gericault is thought to have completed his studies for the Raft during the spring and summer of 1818. Then worked out his composition during the summer and autumn, in which he transferred his completed design onto canvas by November 1818.
The French painter Jean Louis André Théodore Gericault style is considered to be the first true romanticist. The son of a lawyer, born September 26, 1791 in Rouen; Gericault in 1808, entered the studio of the famous painter of horses Carle Vernet. Shortly in 1815, Gericault joined the royal musketeers and was stationed at Versailles for 2 or 3 months. He return to Paris in 1817, where he created his first lithographs the following year he began work on what become his largest and best known composition, the Raft of the Medusa; a tragic shipwreck in which Gericault conveyed into a painting. Gericault painting was intended to be a confrontational piece, both politically and artistically. He transformed a contemporary subject into a historical painting. The story of the painting “The Raft of the Medusa”, is a depiction of a real historical event described to him by two me he met in 1818; whose accounts of the shipwreck inspired his piece.
The voyage of la Meduse was first published in 1817 by Henri Savigny and Alexandre Correard, a surgeon and a geographer on the Medusa; also the two men Gericault encountered in 1818. The ship was transporting soldiers, passengers and the governor Colonel Julien Schmaltz; when the catastrophe occurred. The ship ran off the west coast of Arica on July 2nd 1816, when it claimed over 150 lives including the Captain. The ship was abandon, and approximately 250 people were put onto six life boats leaving the vast majority whom were ordinary soldiers, low ranking officers and civilians to a makeshift raft. In haste to get to shore the tow-ropes were untied leaving 149 men and one woman stranded; with no provisions and no navigational equipment. “Outbreaks of mutiny…mindless violence occurred from the second day” (Christine). By the fourth, survivors was practicing cannibalism and the eighth day, survivors through the injured and dying overboard to extend provisions. The final fifteen men survived for another five days until their rescue, five died shortly after.
Gericault chose to use the first sighting of the “Argus” prior to rescue as his composition from a number of scenes. His painting visualized, “the fallacy of hope and pointless suffering, and at worst, the basic human instinct to survive…[which] superseded all moral considerations and plunged civilized man into barbarism” (Christine). The second edition of the Medusa narrative depicts abolitionist sympathies, interpreting the black figure as a symbol of hope. The ordinary soldiers on the raft were in fact multi-racial. The selection of a black man in France at the time was a highly controversial decision. Scholars believe the exhibition for this second edition was timed specifically to coincide with British anti-slavery agitation.
Rosenthal, Donald A. "Gericault's Expenses For The Raft Of The Medusa." Art Bulletin 62.4 (1980): 638. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 Mar. 2012.
Riding, Christine. "The Fatal Raft" History Today 53.2 (2003): 38. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 Mar. 2012.
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