Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

The story furnished Liberals with evidence of Royalist and aristocratic corruption and incompetence, while the government tried to ignore the scandal. Géricault’s painting added new fuel to these fires. After the Salon, Géricault retreated to a village near Fontainebleau called Féricy, the country home of his former schoolmate and close friend, the economist Auguste Brunet. As Colta Ives (MMA 2000 ) has convincingly argued, the affable figure with wavy hair and sideburns in the present drawing bears a close resemblance to two known portraits of Brunet by Géricault, an ink drawing at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and a lithograph. The drawing’s inscription, “drawing by Géricault made at the Magdelaine near Fontainebleau” refers to the church at Féricy. During his stay, Géricault had painted a banner for the church. The dismembered body parts at right are details of the victim-survivors of the Raft of the Medusa . The bent leg belongs to the half-nude, heroic black soldier who climbs on a barrel and waves at the rescue ship at the apex of the composition. The clenched hand may refer generally to the reaching hands of several figures in the painting, or may be based on the left hand of the victim at the bottom right of the pyramid, who helps a fellow survivor gain leverage on the barrel. As Ives relates, Brunet, like Géricault, had recently criticized the government—in his economic and political pamphlet, De l’aristocratie et de la démocratie —and was no stranger to attacks from the press. Further, Eitner has deduced that Brunet probably introduced Géricault to the two survivors who published their account of the Medusa disaster, thus adding another link between Géricault’s host at Féricy, the contents of the drawing, and this difficult moment in the artist’s life. In its juxtaposition of dismembered body parts from the Raft with the animated, attentive regard of a friend, the drawing is both moving and enigmatic. Each briskly rendered item seems to carry symbolic weight in its deliberate position across the sheet—suggesting, in Ives’ words, “a rebus or perhaps a personal memento.” (AK)