Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

The present sheet belongs to a relatively advanced stage of Géricault’s development of the Race . He had begun with studies drawn from life as the events took place in mid-February, and made oil studies and many more drawings in the studio in the following months. As Whitney noted, Géricault’s earliest studies, such as an oil now in the Walters Gallery (fig. 7 ), depict the start of the race from an elevated viewpoint, with the action directed from right to left, as it would have appeared to a spectator observing the event from the Pincio side of the Corso. Later studies position the action more closely to the viewer and roughly on the same level, with the figures shown more in profile than obliquely, advancing across the image field as if in a classical frieze. In the final stage of the project, as seen here and in the famous oil study in the Louvre which represents the final idea for the composition (fig. 8 ), Géricault redirected the action of the start of the race from left to right. In the present work and the Louvre painting, the rearing horse is shown with his forelegs poised just over the starting line. The configuration of the horse and groom in this drawing was partly inspired by a seventeenth-century sculpture of a horse under a groom’s restraint, one of the two sculptures of Horse Tamers (also called the Marly Horses ) by Guillaume Coustou, which were displayed in the Tuileries gardens in Paris during Géricault’s lifetime (fig. 9 ). Among the several studies that investigate this particular configuration of horse and groom, this sheet is unique in its positioning of the man behind the horse, which allows the artist to emphasize the powerful silhouette and musculature of the horse’s flank. As Whitney describes the drawing, the groom’s contemporary Roman dress and the knotted tail of the horse reveal that at this moment, Géricault was still committed to depicting the races as a modern event. Many other studies from this phase depict the grooms nude, in keeping with academic study practice, while the temporal setting of the ‘final’ Louvre painting is unspecific, with a generalized classical atmosphere. (AK)

Fig. 7 Study for The Race of the Riderless Horses , Walters Art Gallery ( 37 . 189 )