The succès de scandale of Théodore Géricault

Associated media

Two books on Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault was born in a time of social and political turmoil and his passionate and responsive temperament ensured that the currents powerfully affected his artistic ideas. Born into a bourgeois family and later the beneficiary of a generous inheritance, Géricault had a degree of independence that allowed him to explore non-traditional subjects free from the demands of patrons. When, as a student of the École des Beaux-Arts, he found himself ineligible to enter the Prix de Rome he simply used his own money to travel to Italy.

In Rome, Florence and Naples Géricault studied Renaissance art and ancient statues, as well as absorbing local traditions and subjects. He thought about painting a picture on the subject of bandits, who were a serious problem in the hills around Rome. He also he came up with several powerful designs of men restraining horses, though he never executed the grand canvas that he planned. (He was a great horse enthusiast and often painted and drew horses and riders.) Had he been more dependent on exhibiting at the annual Salon, he might have had a reason to execute huge and complex oil paintings. Self-motivated, he had so many ideas and interests that it was hard for him to settle on a project for long. The sole exception was The Raft of the Medusa (1819).

In Théodore Géricault, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyerclearly describes the background and development of that project. La Meduse, a French ship bound for the colony of Senegal, foundered and the crew and passengers disembarked in a lifeboat and a raft. The distribution was unequal, with the captain and a few officers in the lifeboat and everyone else on the ramshackle raft. Fearing the raft might encumber them the crew of the lifeboat cut the raft adrift and eventually made their way to safety. Those on the raft suffered terribly. After almost two weeks of mutiny, murder, insanity and cannibalism on the tiny raft, the eventual rescuers found the 150 people aboard had been reduced to 15, five of whom soon died. The scandal of the officers’ behaviour became a cause célèbre in France, dividing the population along political lines. Géricault went to great pains to perfect the picture’s design, including interviewing and painting participants, constructing exact models and making endless preparatory studies. This book reproduces some of these studies, including survivor portraits and paintings of corpses, as well as discussing the reaction to the painting, which was shown in the Salon of 1819.

Géricault came to London to oversee the exhibition of the painting. It was hung in a hall in Piccadilly and an entrance fee charged. It was a financial success, though a showing in Dublin was not and the painting returned to France. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, assisted by many illustrations, explains how the artist was influenced by the English printmaking culture when he made his own prints in London. A large part of Géricault’s output during his period in England was a set of lithographs of scenes showing everyday life in London – itinerant musicians, the poor and unfortunate, and scenes involving horses.  Géricault fitted into English society well, with his passion for sport (boxing and especially horse-racing). His liberal outlook matched those of his hosts and he came to admire British art (especially Stubbs and Constable). He also attended public executions, an act which displays his ambivalence as a political and social progressive with an appetite for sensation and horror. These contradictory tendencies make his art particularly absorbing and complex.

The artist’s last years were troubled. Financial investments proved disastrous, he suffered a number of serious riding accidents and became deeply depressed. He seemed to drift as an artist, yet his talent still burned bright, as the evidence of his last series of paintings show. He painted ten portraits of people suffering from madness, five of which survive. They are intensely felt and tenderly observed, treating the subjects as people both dignified and disturbed. It seems not unlikely that Géricault’s own mental disturbances and experiences with friends and relatives who went mad or committed suicide gave him insight into the subject and elicited compassion. On his deathbed, consumed by cancer, he spoke to friends with regret about all the grand ideas that he had never painted.

Despite Géricault’s relatively short life and limited output, he is still the focus of much academic interest. This is understandable as he is one of the most influential artists of the period and his dramatic paintings have a dark magnetism regardless of whether one approaches them as an ordinary viewer or an informed specialist. What is gratifying is that research yields new knowledge about his art. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer has digested recent scholarship and integrated it into a flowing narrative covering the artist’s life and art.

Athanassoglou-Kallmyer describes Géricault’s art and explains the motivations behind the artist very well. It also sets these in context while not overwhelming the reader with too much detail. The glossary and chronologies cover relevant historical events and characters for general readers. For anyone already with an interest in Géricault this book makes an excellent survey.

Théodore Géricault: The Graphic Work – L’œuvre Gravé. A Catalogue Raisonnéis a revised reprint of the catalogue of Géricault’s complete prints, consisting of 78 lithographs and one etching, with 28 items that are collaborative works or are not certainly attributed to Géricault. Printmaking in France and Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century had multiple functions. Prints served as records of famous people, views and events (such battles, crimes or state occasions) and were sold in great quantities (generally at low prices) through print shops. Prints could carry political meanings as subtle as coded comment or as blatant as satire and propaganda. The formerly dominant print medium of etching (drawing on a metal plate with a sharp point) was being superseded by lithography (drawing on a stone with waxy crayon or ink), which could generate broader effects of tones, was technically easier for the artist to make and much quicker for the printer to edition. Lithography had another advantage – printing in two or three colours was a much more viable proposition in lithography than it had been in etching.

Géricault was one of the first artists to use lithography in France. He took up battle subjects and scenes of soldiers, inspired by his liberal sympathies. Return from Russia, a two-colour lithograph from 1818, shows an injured grenadier leading an emaciated horse on which a blinded cuirassier (a lightly armoured cavalryman) rides as they participate in Bonaparte’s disastrous retreat from Moscow. Géricault had served time in a mounted regiment during 1815. He had great feeling for the common soldier and cavalryman at a time when Bonaparte’s veterans were feared and shunned by French society, seen as spectres of military humiliation, perpetrators of crimes and fomenters of revolt.

The topic that most fascinated Géricault was horses, and the majority of his prints are of this subject. It is striking how various his scenes are: horses being exercised and raced, as well as at rest, being shod and led, drawing carts and fighting one another. It is the willingness of Géricault to show horses in situations of stress, combat and suffering, as well as dead, that confirms he is an artist with sentiment but one who never stooped to sentimentality. He understood the life of a horse in all its aspects and this is another example of his deep empathy, which so marked his Raft of the Medusa.   

The Graphic Work has an updated translation of Loys Delteil’s 1924 catalogue and has supplemented it with Charles Clément’s pioneering research (both in French and English). In addition, two important recent essays are included (English text only) and all the hand-coloured and multicolour prints are reproduced in colour. Even a handful of surviving card transfer sheets are illustrated (an artist could draw on to a prepared sheet not just directly on to a lithographic stone). For anyone interested in equine art, Géricault is a key figure and it is in his lithographs that one can best see his knowledge of horses.

Théodore Géricault by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer is published by Phaidon, 2010.  232 pp., hardback, 5 mono/195 colour illus, €59.95/£39.95/$69.95.ISBN 9-780714-844008

Readership:  General

Théodore Géricault: The Graphic Work – L’œuvre Gravé. A Catalogue Raisonné is published by Alan Wofsy Fine Art, 2010.  280 pp., hardback, fully illus in colour and mono, $150.00. ISBN 9-781556-600944

Readership: Academic