Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a French painter and lithographer. His best-known painting is The Raft of the Medusa. Despite his short life, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.
Paintings by Théodore Géricault
The 1821 Derby at Epsom (1821)
The 1821 Derby at Epsom, or Horse Race (Course de chevaux, traditionally called Le Derby de 1821 à Epsom) is an 1821 painting by the French artist Théodore Géricault in the Louvre Museum, showing The Derby of that year.
Fascinated by horses, Géricault made many paintings portraying them. Working for a while at the imperial stables at Versailles, he had the opportunity to study them in detail and made numerous portraits of horses. Other paintings of horses by Géricault include Officer Hunter Horse of the Imperial Guard Charging (1812) and Race of Free Horses in Rome (1819).
The Raft of the Medusa (1819)
The Raft of the Medusa (French: Le Radeau de la Méduse [lə ʁado d(ə) la medyz]) – originally titled Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene) – is an oil painting of 1818–1819 by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. At 491 by 716 cm (16 ft 1 in by 23 ft 6 in), it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 150 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain. Géricault chose this large-scale uncommissioned work to launch his career, using a subject that had already generated widespread public interest. The event fascinated him.
Théodore Géricault's social circles had close family connections with the French navy and were directly involved in France's colonies and France's slave trade. Indeed, one of these relations, a naval officer and a slave owner, died defending France's colonial interests on the coast of west Africa in 1779 not far from the site of the Méduse shipwreck decades later.
Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (1820)
Portrait of a Kleptomaniac or Portrait of an Insane Person (French: L'Aliéné or Portrait d'un Cleptomane aka Le Monomane du Vol) is an 1822 oil painting by Théodore Géricault. It is part of series of ten portraits made for the psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget and is currently kept in the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium.
The painting belongs to a series of ten portraits of the insane inmates of Salpêtrière asylum in Paris. Géricault made it near the end of his career and the five remaining portraits from the series represent the painter's last triumph. Psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget, one of the founders of social psychiatry, asked Géricault to do these paintings which would represent each of the clinical models of the disease. Georget believed that dementia was a modern disease, which depended in large part on social progress in industrialized countries. He believed that those who were mentally ill needed help. Instead of bringing the ill persons into a classroom to examine their physical characteristics, the doctor instructed Géricault to paint models representing different types of madness. Georget appreciated the objectivity in this series of works that established a link between romantic art and empirical science.
The Charging Chasseur (1812)
The Charging Chasseur, or An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging, is a c. 1812 oil-on-canvas painting by the French painter Théodore Géricault. Depicting an officer of the Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard ready to attack, the painting was placed on display at both the Salon of 1812 and Salon of 1814. It is now on at the Louvre in Paris.
The painting was Géricault's first exhibited work and it is an example of his attempt to condense both movement and structure in his art. It represents French romanticism and has a motif similar to Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps, but non-classical characteristics of the picture include its dramatic diagonal arrangement and vigorous paint handling.
The Wounded Cuirassier (1814)
The Wounded Cuirassier (French: Le Cuirassier blessé quittant le feu) is an oil painting of a single anonymous soldier descending a slope with his nervous horse by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). In this Salon of 1814 entry, Géricault decided to turn away from scenes of heroism in favor of a subject that is on the losing side of the battle. On display in the aftermath of France's disastrous military campaign in Russia, this life-size painting captured the feeling of a nation in defeat. There are no visible wounds on the figure, and the title has sometimes been interpreted to refer to soldier's injured pride. The painting stood in stark contrast with Géricault's Charging Chasseur, as it didn't focus on glory or the spectacle of battle. Only his Signboard of a Hoofsmith, which is currently in a private collection, bears any resemblance in form or function to this painting.
The final salon version of The Wounded Cuirassier is at the Musée du Louvre and the smaller, study version, is located at the Brooklyn Museum.
The Woman with a Gambling Mania (1820)
The Woman with Gambling Mania (French: La Folle Monomane du jeu) is an 1822 painting by Théodore Géricault. It is a member of a series of ten portraits of people with specific manias done by Géricault between 1820 and 1824, including Portrait of a Kleptomaniac and Insane Woman. Following the controversy surrounding his The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault fell into a depression. In return for help by psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget, Géricault offered him a series of paintings of mental patients, including this one, in a time when the scientific world was curious about the minds of the mentally insane. A solid example of romanticism, Géricault's portrait of a mental asylum patient attempts to show a specific form of insanity through facial expression.
Monomaniac of Envy (1821)
Monomaniac of Envy (Monomane de l’envie), also known by the name of Hyena of Salpêtrière, Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy, and Manic Envy, is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault. Painted as part of his series of ten portraits on the mentally ill, it is one of only five known to survive today. It is currently housed in the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, France.
Mental aberration and irrational states of mind interested Romantic artists who questioned Enlightenment rationality. Géricault, like many of his contemporaries, examined the influence of mental states on the human face and shared the belief, common in his time, that a face more accurately revealed character, especially in madness and at the moment of death. In addition to analyzing faces of patients in hospitals and institutions for the criminally insane, he also studied the heads of guillotine victims.
Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct (1818)
Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct is an 1818 landscape painting by the French artist Théodore Géricault.
It was one of three monumental landscapes showing various times of the day (a planned fourth was not produced). Géricault combines a view of the aqueduct of Spoleto which he had visited in 1817, with the stormy skies and turbulent moods of the developing romantic movement. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The Melancholic Man
The Melancholic Man (French: L'homme mélancolique) is an oil-on-canvas painting discovered by Javier S. Burgos, a Spanish scientist, in Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy in 2019. It depicts a man with a furrowed brow, dressed in a red robe.
Burgos believes it to be by Théodore Géricault, painted as part of the series Les Monomanes (Portraits of the Insane), created between 1821 and 1824. If this identification is correct, it would be the sixth painting of the series to be discovered, representing a melancholic man. This attribution has been contested by several specialists of Géricault.
A Charge of Cuirassiers (1823)
A Charge of Cuirassiers is an 1823 history painting by the French artist Théodore Géricault. It portrays a battle scene from the Napoleonic Wars as charging French cuirassiers seize a regimental colour from Russian infantry. Battle scenes remained popular in the decades after the fighting ceased in 1815, with Géricault's friend Horace Vernet producing a large number. Today the painting is in Wallace Collection in London, having been purchased by the Marquess of Hertford in 1857 in Paris.
The Severed Heads (1818)
The Severed Heads, 1810s, by Théodore Géricault (1791-1824). Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Oil on canvas. NM 2113. Gift 1918 by a consortium.
Gray Horse (1812)
"Cheval arabe gris-blanc", painting by Théodore Géricault (which died in 1824). Painting is on display at Beaux-Arts Museum in Rouen, Normandy, France