GÉRICAULT, Théodore

Although this picture was painted after the death of Napoleon, there was still in the 1820s a considerable market for scenes of Napoleon’s battles. The painting depicts French cuirassiers (heavy cavalrymen) capturing a standard from Russian infantry.

G�ricault seems to have felt something like an inner mission when he chose the most pitiable creatures in society for his subjects. In his studies of neurotics, he made shattering documentations, like this painting.

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The quiet and melancholy Mustapha was a shipwrecked Turkish sailor G�ricault had found in a Paris street and brought home as a model and companion. It is probably his features, dark eyes sad beneath his turban, that are depicted in several late studies of a Turk that strike the viewer as warmly individualized portraits.

This was G�ricault’s first major work. The rider is turned round so far from the waist that the forward movement of the charging horse is exactly the opposite of the rider’s gaze. The curving sabre underlines the turn of the body. The whole painting makes an immediate and spontaneous impression, with all its elements forming one dramatic whole.

The painting was commissioned by an officer who wanted to be represented in uniform, and G�ricault created the supreme image of the wildly charging fighter. He won a medal for the painting in the Salon of 1812.

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This painting belongs to a series, painted by G�ricault between 1810 and 1814, depicting horses in a stable. It is considered to be a portrait of l’Aly, the horse of Napoleon,

In spite of its title, the scene actually represents the horses waiting before the famous race of the Barberi that closes the Roman carnival, and which G�ricault witnessed during his stay in Italy from 1816 to 1819. The work is probably the source of two paintings on the same subject.

The only rivals in Romantic painting to Goya’s visions of the insane is a set of portraits which G�ricault probably painted for his patron, Dr. Georget, of the doctor’s patients as case histories. Victims of social trauma, they expose through their compulsions society’s sickness and the special malady of the age - none more so than the old man whose ‘delusions of military command’ mirror the failed ambitions of Napoleon and his marshals.

This painting belongs to a series of ten portraits of mental patients that G�ricault painted in Parisian lunatic asylums around 1820. G�ricault was the friend of the psychiatrist Dr. Georget, to whom he presented the ten works. The project reflected the notion at that time that there was a link between mental illness and facial expression. Five of the ten portraits survived, including the one in Ghent. G�ricault displays an almost scientific interest in facial expression in this work, which is balanced by his Romantic empathy with the depth of this grimacing face. The painting illustrates the pursuit of truth through the concentrated observation of reality that typified the leading Romantic painters and writers.

The painting is known as The Man from Vend�e.

G�ricault painted five studies of this theme for large painting which was never realized. Two versions depicts the subject as a contemporary scene, to other three (one of them in the Louvre) as antique.

In this composition created in Rome, the power of man struggling against beast is expressed through the study of antiquity and the forms of Michelangelo.

From the mid-15th century until 1882, spring carnival in Rome closed with a horse race. Fifteen to 20 riderless horses, originally imported from the Barbary Coast of North Africa, ran the length of the Via del Corso, a long, straight city street, in about 2,5 minutes.

Throughout his career, G�ricault lovingly depicted the horse as a metaphor for unfettered emotion and power. The artist initially planned to paint a canvas of this subject more than 9 m in width; he completed 20 small oil studies before abandoning the project. In other variations on this theme, G�ricault set the race in ancient, rather than contemporary, Rome.

The theme of G�ricault’s Study of Feet and Hands is a fragment. Thus his still-life shows broken facets of an event, one that has resulted in the death of the individuals whose severed limbs are arranged here, in a dramatic scenario that unleashes emotional responses. G�ricault succeeds in lending the macabre motif a peculiar life of its own. It is as if the painter were concerned to dissolve the boundary between the part and the whole, the dead and the living. There is an air of tenderness in the way in which arm is draped around a foot. The intimate interlacing of a woman’s arm and a man’s legs may also conceal an element of eroticism.

The limbs were possibly painted after living models. G�ricault painted fragments of body parts not only as preparatory studies for the greatest of his masterpieces, the Raft of the Medusa (Paris, Louvre); some he painted later as works more or less in a genre of their own: starting from functional oil sketches, he developed them into an autonomous form.

Like Goya G�ricault turned to printmaking, choosing the new technique of lithography to reach a popular audience. There is pity in his lithographs of the wounded returning from campaign, above all in The Retreat from Russia. These exhausted soldiers stand for an entire nation; but that they have not lost their pride is clear from a companion print, in which a one-legged veteran defiantly shows off his campaign medals to a slouching Swiss guard outside the Louvre, forcing him to present arms.

Painted in 1821, during G�ricault’s stay in London, the canvas takes its inspiration from English sporting prints, which frequently depict horses at the ‘flying gallop’ shown by the painter here. The invention of photography, by allowing the various movements of a galloping animal to be analysed, would allow it to be painted accurately, as Degas was to do in his Race-course paintings.

Alongside his naturalistic subject matter, G�ricault was particularly drawn to two other genres: the horse and the nude. The subject of horses is related to the trip to Italy which he made between 1816 and 1817. There he made numerous drawings and sketches, which he would later use as the basis for larger paintings.

Alongside his naturalistic subject matter, G�ricault was particularly drawn to two other genres: the horse and the nude. This nude study is a masterful composition which combines classicism, monumentality and realism. The theme of the kiss provides the artist with a chance to depict a pair of figures with great sensuality and is also a study of anatomy and the fall of light.

In expressing the predicament of the shipwrecked everywhere in the world, G�ricault had laid the foundations of an aesthetic revolution. The Raft of the Medusa marks the first appearance in a painting of ‘the ugly’ and thereby proclaims its scrupulous respect for the truth, however repulsive the truth might be. This concern for truth is integral to the Romantic temperament.

For his Salon picture in 1819, G�ricault chose a dramatic episode - the wreck of the frigate Meduse, which had set off with a French fleet on an expedition to Senegal and had been lost in July 1816. The French admiralty was accused of having put an incompetent officer in charge of the expedition, the Comte de Chaumareix, a former emigre who had not commanded a vessel for twenty-five years. The picture was an enormous success, more on account of the scandal than because of an interest in the arts. However, G�ricault only received a gold medal, and his picture was not bought by the government.

G�ricault was mortified and decided to exhibit his picture in England, where a pamphlet had been published on the wreck of the Meduse. He entrusted the vast canvas to an eccentric character named Bullock (as Lethi�re had done with his Brutus Condemning his Sons), and it was exhibited in London from 12 June to 31 December 1820, and in Dublin from 5 February to 31 March 1821. G�ricault received a third of the takings, and the operation brought him in quite a large sum (probably 20,000 francs).

The painting was priced at 6,000 francs at the posthumous sale of the artist’s possessions. It was bought by Dedreux-Dorcy, a friend of G�ricault, for an additional five francs, and he sold it to the State for the same amount.

The most horrifying part of the shipwreck had been the drama of 149 wretches abandoned on a raft with only some casks of wine to live on, and the ensuing drunkenness and abominations. When the frigate Argus found the raft, after many days, she was only able to rescue fifteen survivors, of whom five died after being brought ashore. After some hesitation, G�ricault chose this last episode - the sighting of the Argus by the survivors on the raft. Concerning the latter, he set himself to the task of carrying out an inquest as thoroughly as any examining magistrate. He rented a studio opposite the Beaujon hospital so that he could make anatomical studies of the dying.

The picture was painted by G�ricault in an extraordinary state of tension; ‘the mere sound of a smile prevented him from painting’.

The most horrifying part of the shipwreck had been the drama of 149 wretches abandoned on a raft with only some casks of wine to live on, and the ensuing drunkenness and abominations. When the frigate Argus found the raft, after many days, she was only able to rescue fifteen survivors, of whom five died after being brought ashore. After some hesitation, G�ricault chose this last episode — the sighting of the Argus by the survivors on the raft. With regard to the latter, he set himself to the task of carrying out an inquest as thoroughly as any examining magistrate. He rented a studio opposite the Beaujon hospital, so that he could make anatomical studies of the dying.

Like Goya G�ricault turned to printmaking, choosing the new technique of lithography to reach a popular audience. There is pity in his lithographs of the wounded returning from campaign, above all in The Retreat from Russia. These exhausted soldiers stand for an entire nation; but that they have not lost their pride is clear from a companion print, in which a one-legged veteran defiantly shows off his campaign medals to a slouching Swiss guard outside the Louvre, forcing him to present arms.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1814 and met with criticism. The wounded officer, who can still clutch the reins of his rearing horse, is casting his eyes upwards to the dark, clouded sky. This was interpreted as the symbol of France in defeat, vainly trying to summon up the strength for a heroic stand. The criticism was such that the painter threatened several times to destroy the work.

“Fate painting” displaced the older religious forms in the 19th century. Artists depicted man helpless at the mercy of forces of nature, either as a group, in images of horror and despair, or as individuals, as here, cast up senseless on a beach by a storm.

Th�odore G�ricault’s only known erotic painting, this small oil sketch depicts two lovers locked in a passionate embrace while their languid companion calmly watches from the left. The woman’s nudity and relaxed pose evoke the classical tradition of representing repose after lovemaking, a tradition that is also evoked by the way her voluptuous figure complements the statue of Venus above. Encoiled in her lover’s arms and with her legs provocatively exposed, the woman in white is an active participant in the amorous act rather than a passive object. With a modern directness, G�ricault captured the intensity and energy of human sexuality in a manner very different from the idealizing conventions of his age.

G�ricault’s expressive handling of line and paint accords with the passionate energy of the subject matter. Despite the small size and sketchy nature of this painting, G�ricault made it as an independent work of art, intended for close private viewing.

The present painting was a submission for a competition at the �cole des Beaux-Arts in 1812. Fellow students’ paintings from the competition that year show the identical nude male model in the same contorted pose.

Few traces survive from G�ricault’s earliest period (1808-09): a youthful self-portrait, some paintings of horses, inspired by engravings after Vernet, and a sketchbook filled with a profusion of fantasy drawings of horses.

In spite of his Classical schooling, G�ricault broke with traditional themes and forms to set the tone for the developments in French Romanticism. In this picture he took up the theme of a topical historical event. Exhausted almost to the point of death by hunger and cold, these wounded men struggle through a desert of ice. Far from glorifying the soldier’s life, G�ricault depicted the misery of their extreme situation - an approach in tune with the spirit of his age.