Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

9 . Study for “The Race of the Barberi Horses”

1817 Black chalk on paper 7 ⅞ x 10 inches ( 20 x 25 . 5 cm) Collection stamp lower left: Lugt 2103 b (Collection Pierre Olivier Dubaut)

provenance Baron Joseph Vitta; sale, Paris, May 27, 1927 , no. 118 ; Pierre Olivier Dubaut, Paris; Thence by descent. exhi b i t ions Paris, Pavillon Marsan, Les artistes français en Italie de Poussin à Renoir , 1934 , no. 500 ; Bernheim-Jeune 1937 , no. 113 ; Bignou 1950 , no. 32 ; London, Marlborough Fine Art, Théodore Géricault 1791–1824 , October–November, 1952 , no. 47 ; Winterthur 1953 , no. 161 ; Paris, Galerie Berheim Jeune, Gros, Géricault, Delacroix , 1954 , no. 51 ; Paris, Galerie Aubry, Géricault dans les collections privées françaises , November–December, 1964 , no. 66 ; Grunchec 1985 , no. 31 .

l i terature Grunchec 1982 , p. 50 (illus.); Whitney, p. 131 – 32 (illus.); Bazin, vol. IV, no. 1351

Art Cuéllar-Nathan

During his year in Italy ( 1816 – 1817 ), Géricault made enormous progress in draftsmanship and composition. He studied and copied antique sculpture and master works of the Italian Baroque and Renaissance periods, but was also fascinated by the street life and customs of contemporary Rome. The project he envisaged as his Italian magnum opus was an enormous painting that he never completed. It was to represent the celebrated corso de’ Barberi: a series of races of riderless horses down the Via del Corso, an immensely popular event which served as the dramatic focus of the eight days of Carnival preceding Lent. As Wheelock Whitney noted in his meticulous study of the project’s evolution through numerous drawings and oil studies, Géricault would have known about this famous Roman tourist attraction before his departure for Italy, and he surely anticipated the races with great excitement. The spectacle of racing, riderless, Arabian thoroughbreds (named for their origin on the Barbary coast) appealed to his lifelong passion for magnificent horses and to his obsession with subjects that involved violent energies and opposing bodies. Géricault’s typically far-flung visual sources for the project included contemporary popular prints made for tourists and seventeenth- century engravings and sculpture. His studies document his changing strategies for seizing a particular moment of the race—he ultimately settled on the start, la mossa —and the different artistic languages (classical and contemporary) that he used to render and pose individual figures and groups, and to bring them together in a compositional ensemble. As a whole, these studies are a monument to Géricault’s unrealized ambition to capture contemporary life on a grand scale, in the heroic framework of multi-figured painting.