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The Raft of the Medusa is a painting of a real disaster, made at a scale previously reserved for saints and emperors. In July 1816 the French frigate Meduse ran aground off the coast of Mauritania. There were not enough lifeboats, so 147 people were put on a hastily built raft. When the raft was finally found thirteen days later, only fifteen were still alive; the survivors had resorted to cannibalism and had thrown the wounded overboard.
Gericault, then twenty-seven, interviewed survivors, commissioned a model of the raft from the ship’s carpenter, and visited hospitals and morgues to study the colour of dying flesh. He made dozens of studies and built the final canvas in a studio on the rue des Martyrs, where he worked for months with the painting on the floor. The composition is a double pyramid: the dead and dying at the base, the living straining upward toward a speck on the horizon - the rescue ship Argus, which in the painting is barely visible.
The painting was shown at the Salon of 1819, where it won a gold medal and caused a political scandal: the Meduse’s captain was a royalist appointee who had not sailed for twenty years, and the government had tried to suppress the story. Gericault died at thirty-two, and the painting was bought by the state in 1824.
Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) was the first great Romantic painter in France and the teacher Delacroix never formally had. He was a superb horseman and a painter of horses, soldiers and the insane; his series of portraits of asylum patients is among the most humane work of the period. He died of tuberculosis after a series of riding accidents, leaving fewer than fifty paintings.
The wreck of the Meduse was a national humiliation and a scandal that exposed the incompetence of the restored Bourbon administration. Gericault’s decision to paint it at history-painting scale, with ordinary sailors as heroes, was itself a political act. The painting became a touchstone for later realists and for Delacroix, who posed for one of the figures.
Denon Wing · Level 1 · Salle Mollien (Room 700)
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
Other pieces from the same artist, period or type of object.
