Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

I n a career that barely spanned fifteen years, Théodore Géricault produced one of the most original bodies of art work of the nineteenth century. It is an oeuvre that continues to provoke interest and dispute, from basic issues of chronology, dating and attribution, to interpretations of the historical, political and aesthetic intentions that animate the artist’s work. For many years following his death in 1824 at the age of 32 , Géricault was a mythic, shadowy figure, an incomplete genius defined by one work, The Raft of the Medusa , and by a protracted illness and passionate temperament (he had a disastrous love affair with his uncle’s young wife, who bore his illegitimate son). By the 21 st century, after Lorenz Eitner’s and Philippe Grunchec’s important studies from the 1980 s, 1 a breathtaking retrospective in Paris in 1991 , 2 the publication of an extensive raisonné of the artist’s oeuvre, 3 a new, synthetic monograph, 4 and an enormous range of published material that brings new interpretive strategies to Géricault’s work, we have at least reached a consensus of sorts on the stature and breadth of the artist’s accomplishments in different media. There is further agreement that the artist was engaged in the changing world in which he lived. “Our” Géricault, as Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer put it, is “a man of his time,” responsive to the turbulent era that comprised the end of Napoléon’s regime and the early years of the contested Bourbon Restoration. In his challenges to various conventions that governed the genres of painting, Géricault is very much a “harbinger of the modern spirit,” as Henri Zerner has written. 5 Géricault was a great painter and accounts of his work have often taken shape around major projects of painting. The Charging Chasseur and Wounded Cuirassier , Salon paintings of 1812 and 1814 , belong to the final years of Napoléon’s empire in their yearning for military glory and blunt depiction of retreat and defeat. The unrealized Race of the Barberi Horses from the artist’s year in Italy ( 1816 – 1817 ) was to be a huge, multi-figured painting in the grand manner that depicted a popular spectacle in contemporary Rome. The colossal Raft of the Medusa of the 1819 Salon represented a contemporary, politically explosive story as both an heroic allegory and a gruesome report of ignoble realities; it remains the artist’s masterpiece. The Epsom Downs Derby , the most ambitious painting project of Géricault’s visits

A Stable Hand Grooming a Horse (detail, cat. 3 )