^
Died on 26 January 1824: Jean
Louis André Théodore Géricault, French Romantic painter
born on 26 September 1791.
— Painter who exerted a seminal influence on the development of Romantic
art in France. Géricault was a fashionable dandy and an avid horseman whose
dramatic paintings reflect his colourful, energetic, and somewhat morbid
personality.
— Théodore Géricault’s daring personality coupled with his tragically
short life fit the mold for the Romantic artists of his era. After only
three years of studio classes, most of his artistic training came from traveling
to the Louvre and eventually to Rome, where he found inspiration in the
master works of Rubens
and Michelangelo.
Géricault was intrigued by big cats and often used them in compositions
to suggest the untamable power of nature, a recurrent theme in French romanticism.
His dramatic and controversial paintings profoundly influenced nineteenth-century
art. Géricault died in 1824, at the age of 32, after a prolonged illness
caused by a riding accident. Because Géricault died at such a young age,
his works are quite rare. Most of his work is in the Louvre and there are
only the twenty-one Géricault images in American Museums, including Two
Lions, After Peter Paul Rubens (1825) at the National Museum of Wildlife
Art.
— Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault was a French
painter, perhaps the most influential artist of his time, and a seminal
figure of the 19th-century romantic movement in art.
Géricault, born into a wealthy Rouen
family, studied with the French painters Carle
Vernet and Pierre
Guérin and also traveled to Italy to study from 1816 to 1817.
He was greatly influenced by the work of Michelangelo and other Italian
Renaissance painters, as well as that of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.
Early in his career, Géricault's paintings began to exhibit qualities
that set him apart from such neoclassical French painters as Jacques-Louis
David.
Géricault soon became the acknowledged
leader of the French romantics. His Charging Chasseur (1812) and
Wounded Cuirassier (1814) display violent action, bold design,
and dramatic color, and evoke powerful emotion. These characteristics appeared
in heightened form in his immense and overpowering canvas Raft of the
Medusa (1819), showing the dying survivors of a contemporary shipwreck.
The painting's disturbing combination of idealized figures and realistically
depicted agony, as well as its gigantic size and graphic detail, aroused
a storm of controversy between neoclassical and romantic artists. Its depiction
of a politically volatile scandal (the wreck was due to government mismanagement)
also caused controversy.
In 1820 Géricault traveled to England,
where he painted his Race for the Derby at Epsom. At the time of
his death, Géricault was engaged in painting a series of portraits
of mental patients that demonstrate the preoccupation of the romantic artists
with derangement and neurosis. Among his other works are a number of bronze
statuettes, a superb series of lithographs, and hundreds of drawings and
color sketches.
— Théodore Géricault grew up in the turbulent years of the French Revolution
and Napoléon's reign. He studied with several fashionable artists,
but the strongest impact on his work, aside from Goya,
came from the influence of Baron Jean-Antoine
Gros (1771-1835) — a painter who had studied with David and who
was a fundamental link between David and the new generation of French painters
of the early nineteenth century. From Gros's canvases, especially those
which make Napoleon the centre of an emotional, almost mystical, glorification;
Géricault drew much inspiration both for Romantic interpretation and for
styles.
Géricault, like Gros, Goya, and other artists,
was interested in painting contemporary, topical events, not only as a depiction
of that particular event, but also as an exploration of the passionate emotions
and truths that underlay it. Often Géricault's searches yielded dark and
previously unknown images. Fascinated by violence and horror, he made a
series of bloodcurdling paintings of the decapitated heads of criminals.
These he studied not in the scientific manner of a Leonardo
da Vinci eager to learn the secrets of the human form, but for the awful
nature of suffering and violent death, something he himself courted by riding
dangerous horses and by a failed attempt at suicide.
That Géricault found the irrational compelling
is confirmed by another disturbing series, this time of mad men and women.
Whereas Goya had portrayed the hallucinations to which a madman might be
prone, Géricault intensively studied the faces of those who were actually
insane. The fact that these disturbed and frightening creatures were now
considered, like the severed heads, worth subjects for painting demonstrates
a fundamental shift in the concept of what art was supposed to depict.
It is impossible to conceive of David, the
great Neo-classicist, painting such gruesome and, in the traditional view,
such uninspiring and degrading subjects. Among the most remarkable paintings
of Géricault's short and tempestuous life, these images explore various
forms of madness. Beautifully painted, some of them reminiscent of the insightful
portraits by the mature Rembrandt,
the likenesses are both terrifying and pathetic. These are memorable likenesses
- painted with a sober, tempered palette and a spontaneous, free, heavily
loaded brush. These works have never been surpassed for their incisive exploration
of the madness that Géricault thought of not as a sort of extraneous invasion
of the soul but as something intrinsic to the human mind.
Géricault's famous Raft of the Medusa
revealed his abilities to plan out and complete a vast and ambitious history
painting. The story of the raft was a topical subject and thus something
that would have been disdained by many earlier painters. A notorious event,
involving political corruption and scandal, since the incompetent captain
owed his job to his allegiance to the French monarchy, it was the sort of
horrific subject that interested Géricault and his contemporaries. Moreover,
the ordeal of the victims involved a titanic struggle against the forces
of nature, brilliantly shown in the painting by the immense, stormy sea,
and the powerless occupants of the raft. The unequal struggle of man against
nature was a theme that fascinated many of the best painters of the first
half of the nineteenth century.
Géricault's early death, caused by a fall
from a horse at age 32, ended a brilliant and original career.
— LINKS
— Equestrian
Portrait of Charles V (1815) — Le
Radeau de la Méduse (1819, 491x716cm) _ détail
— Study
for The Raft of the Medusa — Fou
(1823) — Madwoman
child murderer (1822) — Madwoman
(1823) — Woman
with gambling mania (1822) — Derby
at Epsom (1820) — Têtes
coupées — An
Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging — Officer
of the Imperial Guard — Officer
of the Imperial Guard — An
Italian Mountain Peasant (1817)
— A
Horse frightened by Lightning (1814, 49x60cm). This painting is probably
an early work, and one of a number of paintings of horses made by the artist
at the time. Many of these were studies for the painting exhibited by Géricault
at the Salon of 1812, the Cavalry Officer which shows the influence
of Rubens and Gros. While some of the studies are subdued in character,
the distant storm and its effect on the horse add a note of drama into this
painting.
— Two
Lions, after Peter Paul Rubens (1825) Géricault took the subject of
this painting from Rubens’
cycle, Le Mariage d’Henri IV et Marie de Médici, a group of 27
monumental canvasses Rubens executed for the royal couple between 1627 and
1630. In Rubens’ picture, the lions are ridden by two cupid-like putti and
harnessed to the triumphal chariot of the city of Lyons, while above them
the royal couple are depicted as Juno and Jupiter, seated in the clouds.
Géricault depicts the two male lions in a turbulent landscape. While Rubens
had used these lions to pull a wedding carriage for royalty, Géricault liberated
them and placed them in an imaginary landscape that glorifies their power
and wildness. Géricault was a great admirer of Rubens and undoubtedly made
studies for this painting when he saw the entire Rubens cycle on exhibit
between 1802 and 1815. In this picture however, we see the French romanticist’s
infatuation with wild creatures, particularly big cats, animals that symbolized
the movement’s rebellion against society’s preoccupation with reason, civilization
and classicism. Géricault extracted the lions from the festive marriage
scene, liberated them from their harness and riders, and extolled them in
a wild and moody landscape. |
Né le 26 septembre 1791, dans une famille aisée de Rouen, Géricault étudia
dans les ateliers des peintres Carle Vernet (où il fit la connaissance de
son fils, Horace) et Pierre Guérin avant de s'inscrire en 1811, à l'École
des beaux-arts de Paris. Après avoir échoué au concours du grand prix de
Rome, il décida de partir pour l'Italie à ses propres frais. Il fut très
impressionné par les peintres de la Renaissance italienne, en particulier
Michel-Ange, ainsi que par le maître flamand Pierre Paul Rubens. 
