The Raft of the Medusa

A closer look

The huge canvas is built like a pyramid of bodies. At the bottom, half in the water, lie the dead and the dying: a father holds the corpse of his son across his knees, staring blankly ahead, and a body slides off the raft into the sea. From there the figures rise in a diagonal of growing hope, ending in a man held up by his companions, waving a cloth towards a tiny ship on the horizon, the Argus, which is barely visible. The wind fills the makeshift sail in the opposite direction, carrying the raft away from rescue, so the outcome is still uncertain.

Géricault painted the bodies as strong and muscular, like heroes of classical art, rather than as starving, wasted survivors, giving the scene the grandeur of a history painting. His friend Eugène Delacroix, then a young student, posed for the figure lying face down in the foreground. The dark, contrasting light recalls Caravaggio and Michelangelo. Géricault used a great deal of bitumen, a brown pigment that never dries properly, and as a result parts of the canvas have darkened and cracked over the past two centuries.

History of the painting

In July 1816 the French frigate Méduse, carrying settlers and officials to Senegal, ran aground on a sandbank off the coast of West Africa. Her captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, was a returned émigré who had hardly been to sea for twenty years and owed his post to the restored monarchy. There was not enough room in the lifeboats, so about 150 people were put on a hastily built raft, which the boats soon cut loose. During thirteen days adrift the men on the raft endured mutiny, killing, starvation and cannibalism; when the brig Argus found them, only fifteen were still alive, and several of those died soon afterwards.

Two survivors, the surgeon Henri Savigny and the engineer Alexandre Corréard, published an account of the disaster in 1817. It became a sensation and a political scandal, because it exposed the incompetence of officials appointed for their loyalty to the king. The 27-year-old Géricault read it and decided to paint the subject on a monumental scale. He shaved his head, shut himself away in a large studio near the Hôpital Beaujon, interviewed Savigny and Corréard, who also posed for him, and had the ship's carpenter, another survivor, build a scale model of the raft. He studied the sick and dying in the hospital and brought severed limbs back to the studio, and in his many sketches he tried out scenes of mutiny and cannibalism before choosing the moment of hope.

At the Salon of 1819 the picture was listed only as 'Scene of a Shipwreck', but everyone knew what it showed. Critics were divided, and the State did not buy it. In 1820 Géricault took it to London, where it was exhibited in the Egyptian Hall and seen by around 40,000 paying visitors. After the painter's early death in January 1824, the director of the royal museums, the Comte de Forbin, acquired it for the Louvre at the sale of his studio. It has remained there ever since, and it became one of the founding images of French Romanticism, admired by Delacroix and later by Courbet and many modern artists.