A national disgrace, painted huge
In France the temperament arrived not in a private house but on the biggest wall in Paris, as a public scandal. Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) was rich, restless, and barely twenty-seven, and he found his subject in a fresh national disgrace. In 1816 a French naval frigate called the Méduse, run aground off the African coast by an incompetent captain who owed his command to politics, had been abandoned by its officers. About 150 of the lowlier passengers and crew were packed onto a hastily lashed-together raft and cut loose to drift. Thirteen days later, fifteen were still alive. What had happened on the raft (starvation, madness, mutiny, cannibalism) became a scandal the restored monarchy desperately wanted forgotten.
Géricault went after it like a reporter. He tracked down two of the survivors, the surgeon Henri Savigny and the engineer Alexandre Corréard, and interviewed them. He had the raft’s carpenter build him a scale model. He went to the Beaujon hospital morgue to sketch corpses, studied the faces of the dying, and kept severed limbs in his studio until friends called the place a charnel house; for the colors of dead flesh he even borrowed a severed head from an asylum. (The lurid story that he hoarded freshly guillotined heads is a later embellishment; drop it.) Then he painted the result at the scale of history painting, the grand mode the academy kept for gods and kings: sixteen feet tall and twenty-three feet wide.
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The composition is the whole argument. Géricault piles the figures into a pyramid that climbs from the dead slumping off the front of the raft, up through the despairing and the dying, to a single straining peak: a Black man, hoisted on his fellows’ shoulders (often identified with the sailor Jean Charles), waving a rag at a ship so tiny on the horizon you have to look twice to find it. Look at who Géricault put at the literal summit of the picture, the one body lifted above all the others and reaching toward rescue. In 1819, with France’s slavery and abolition debates still live, he placed a Black man at the top of the pyramid of hope, the single figure on whom every chance of survival now hangs. Two diagonals cross the raft, one of bodies, one of the wind in the makeshift sail, and they pull against each other so the whole thing feels like it is heaving on the swell. There is no hero. There is no order. There is a heap of ordinary men, painted with the size and seriousness once spent on the deaths of saints, straining toward a hope the size of a fly. Shown at the official Salon (the State’s great annual exhibition, the one show where a French career was made or broken) in 1819, it took private horror and a buried government embarrassment and bolted them to the most public wall in the country. The new temperament had gone loud.
Géricault did not get to build on it. A few years later he died at thirty-two from the slow ruin of a riding accident, a meteor who crossed the sky once. But he had a friend at his side in those years, a younger painter who had even posed for one of the raft’s dead figures, and that friend would carry the French banner for the next forty years.