Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

learning and study from the very beginning. In late 1808 , the young Géricault studied informally with Carle Vernet, who specialized in equestrian themes and scenes of fashionable urban life. It was, of course, Géricault’s passion for horses and his prowess as a rider that drew him to Vernet, and he began his intense, lifelong study of equine anatomy and movement in drawings and oil sketches made from life during these early years. Around 1810 , his desire for a more structured framework of training led him to the studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a leading painter of historical and mythological narrative in the classical style. The drawing of a seated male nude, dated c. 1810 by Bazin (cat. 1 ), but possibly executed a few years later, appears to have been inspired by Guérin’s painting Return of Marcus Sextus , which had been a huge success at the 1799 Salon. Though Géricault did not remain in Guérin’s studio for long, he did not abandon direct study from the male nude—a key part of his training with Guérin—or the classical ideal. In the artist’s own words, his independent course of study was “to draw and paint after the great Old Masters,” and “to draw after the antique,” or examples of ancient Greek and Roman art in the Louvre (then renamed the Musée Napoléon, and enriched by great works acquired from recent military conquest). 6 Five drawings in this exhibition (cat. 4 – 8 ) provide evidence of the different formal languages that Géricault explored in drawingmedia as he sought to develop a grand manner that would serve him in painting large, multi-figured compositions during this period of independent exploration. The elegant, linear rhythms of Flaxman’s illustrations of The Illiad (cat. 4 ) offered one way of impartingmovement to a figural composition, while the powerfully muscular energies of Giulio Romano (cat. 5–6 ) offered another for capturing the strain and conflict of battle. The elaborately composed and rendered Death of Paris (cat. 8 ) is one of seven compositional studies that Géricault produced in 1816 on the mythological story of Paris and Oenone . In that year, the candidates for the French Academy’s Rome Prize were given the subject of Paris and Oenone for the third, definitive stage of the competition, the painted compositional study. Although Géricault had already been eliminated from the competition, he doggedly pursued the compositional assignment. The resulting pen and wash drawings represent different moments in the story, and