Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

startlingly indecorous corpse, headless and half-naked, in the right foreground of the painting. These transformations point not only to Géricault’s facility with different formal languages for representing the male body, but also to his strategic manipulation and unexpected mixing of these languages—real and ideal—to achieve maximum narrative and dramatic impact. The aforementioned figure who falls with one hand on his head is surely an early source for the dark-haired corpse in the final composition who lies on his stomach, one arm stretched over a piece of wood. Géricault posed the young Eugène Delacroix as the model for this corpse; more precisely, he had Delacroix assume positions that were initially inspired by the falling figure after Rubens. Delacroix’s freely rendered study sheet after Géricault’s study of Rubens (fig. 14–15 ) poignantly continues the dialogue between artist and master and model. Among Géricault’s greatest contributions to both watercolor and lithography were his explorations of contemporary, working London, in which he extended his obsession with horses to include the working horses of London’s busy streets, wharves, stables, and outlying fields. The exhibition’s watercolor study of a coal wagon, two sturdy drays and a coal heaver (cat. 14 ), and the graphite study of a field worker leading a horse-drawn straw cart (cat. 16 ), exemplify the stark naturalism of Géricault’s depictions of working London. Other watercolors and drawings from this period (cat. 15 , 17 , 23 ) depict their subjects with a cooly detached, observant mode of address and stately air. As Suzanne Lodge characterized Géricault’s achievements of the English period, he had developed a mode of naturalist expression that was deeply moving, but without the investment in monumentality that he had previously equated with expressive power. “Monumentality,” Lodge wrote, “can exist without inherent heroism or pathos,” an observation that applies to many of the small paintings from the last years in which Géricault was still able to work ( 1822 – 23 ). 8 These include the naturalistic, if tragic industrial landscape of the Lime Kiln (Musée du Louvre), and the exhibition’s Abandoned Cart (cat. 25 ). Probably a study for the Lime Kiln , the impressively stoic Abandoned Cart shares the larger painting’s clear, hard light, austere palette, and quietly monumental gravitas.