Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Géricault’s: The Raft of the Medusa
Jack McElroy
Theodore Gericault was an iconic French painter who was born in 1791 and died rather young at the age of 32 in 1824. His career, while short, was far from uneventful. He began his painterly education under the tutelage of the classicist Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. He studied the styles of english sporting art as well as classical figure drawing at the insistence of Guérin. Ultimately, Gericault did not enjoy his time in the realm of Neoclassicism and found his way to the Louvre where between 1810 and 1815 he studied and sketched from works he saw their including particularly the art of Peter Paul Rubens.
In this essay I will analyse the artist’s transformation from an informal student of Neoclassicism to his place as an innovator of Romanticism. The implications of these varying artistic utterances are built upon a changing audience. Gericault experiments with this new avenue of reception whereon the critiques of authority and the newly restored crown can fall to eager ears. This is in conflict with the previous methods of “soft protest” where the work is done primarily through slight implication or not at all. Romanticism provided the framework for a new discourse of political art, and the reception of these works by non academic viewers would lead to a unity of intention between revolutionary bodies and creative minds.
His break from the order of the Neoclassicists has its genesis in the time he spent in the Louvre. The works of Rubens and Rembrandt which he studied and the pieces he copied all contributed to the emergence of his more spirited style. His usage of line was much more fluid and the emphasis was placed on the interaction of colors rather than the definitions imposed by clear lines. This trend created an interesting dream-like quality in paintings which lead many of the romanticists to choose contemporary subject matter for their work so that they could be viewed and discussed in more macrospective, hypothetical terms. This tool allowed for a critical lense to be placed onto matters of state and authority as opposed to the whitewash of praise which occupied most of the salon atmosphere.
Gericault’s first exhibited work was the Charging Chasseur, 1812 which though still aligned itself with certain aspects of Neoclassicism, definitely signalled the artists movement away from the style towards the emerging trend of Romanticism. When viewing this work as the artist’s first steps into not only the Romantic canon, but the academic setting we see the beginnings of a more free artist at work. The piece grazes the edges of the works it followed from. The next major work of his career was The Raft of the Medusa. This is the work that I will be concerned with in this essay. Additionally, this is the most significant work of the artist’s career and from it an incredible discussion around intention and the effective power of art emerged. Near the end of his life Gericault began a project to paint a series of portraits of insane persons. This followed from an ever present fascination with the morbidity of madness which was most likely due to his tendency to surround himself with various totems of reality and our corporeal reality.
The Raft of the Medusa is emphatically considered Gericault’s masterwork and the discourse around the painting has been immense since his death. The work displays the deserted crew of the Medusa, a French ship which was bound for Senegal carrying the new French colonial governor to the territory. On July 2nd, 1816 the ship crashed off the African coast and an evacuation effort was made using lifeboats. In total, there were 400 passengers aboard the Medusa, and of these passengers around 250 could fit onto the lifeboats. The other 150 were corralled onto a raft which was built from the debris of the wrecked vessel and then tied to the backs of the lifeboats which were intended to tow the rest of the crew to rescue. Shortly after their embarkment, the boats and raft set off and soon found themselves detached. The lifeboats continued on and left the raft and its passengers behind while the poor construction of the raft began to become apparent. Those aboard the slowly sinking planks engaged in mutiny, violence, and eventually cannibalism. The raft drifted at sea for 13 days until it was finally found. 15 survivors were left aboard the crippled mass and were brought back to France where they told their story. This event was a cutting blow to the newly restored Bourbon monarchy. Much of the fault was placed on the incompetent captain of the ship, who due to public perception was believed to be appointed to his position by some sort of preferential treatment by the crown.
The scandal of this incident was very much fresh within the French public’s mind, as well as much of the international community. Gericault took this to be the subject of an uncommissioned project which served as a very real sort of protest propping up his beliefs towards the instability of French society at the time. Gericault’s choice of this subject matter aligned him with a new audience, one of the revolutionary canon; a choice which was often avoided by artists seeking the support of government and nobility for commissions and their livelihood. This piece is in direct conflict with the powers of his time. Gericault is signaling a shift in focus, moving away from the artist’s purpose as a legitimizer of authority and morality towards the more romantic vein of the artist in protest.
Gericault’s process for the construction of this work involved much more than simple preliminary sketches and notes on form, this endeavor was meant to be as much a journalistic investigation into the intricacies of the crash and rescue as it was an artist’s interpretation meant to evoke the dread of the scene. This was a significant part of his transition from an artist for hire to an artist with purpose. However, this is not to say that Gericault sought to completely abandon the artistic status quo or to stand at odds with the academic community, this work simply (if we can say anything about this piece is simple) attempts to situate the artist within a discursive realm which would allow for the exploration of avant garde practices while remaining able to maintain an air of legitimacy among his peers. He worked tirelessly at gathering information about the crash and enlisted the aid of some of the survivors to better realize his vision. He was incredibly focused on emphasizing the “real” of the event through extensive research into the incident.
The painting itself is enormous. It is very much in the style of a history painting, spanning a monumental 491 × 716 cm. The size of the figures ranges from around lifesize for most of the piece to even larger, almost double that in the foreground. The action of the piece is so grand, and the scale so massive that the audience encounters a sense of participation within the piece; one feels as if they are aboard the raft. Each layer of the work as you move from foreground to background evokes a different stage of emotions. The figures who are still shown to be alive at the base of the painting display the supreme despair of their collective psyche. Having been lost at sea for 13 days and surviving by both enduring and participating in violence and cannibalism has left them in a state of utter hopelessness. The muddy browns and dark greens of the lower section of the piece emphasize this helplessness and create the atmosphere of fading hope and inevitable death. Additionally, the drama of the scene is augmented by the roughness of the water surrounding the raft; a feature which was later learned to be constructed as the waters on the day of the rescue were reportedly calm. Nonetheless, this aspect certainly increases our sense of the dire situation that the men were in.
In contrast to the darkness of the lower plane, as the viewer’s eyes advance upward the light of hope begins to show itself both pictorially and emotionally. A crowd of outstretched hands reach up towards their focus; the waving arm frantically trying to flag down a passing ship in the distance, the Argus which would eventually be their rescue. The sky begins to lighten up the harsh darkness of the waves below and, apart from the blackness of the top right corner, the stormy clouds and rough seas give way to a shining horizon line. There is a surge which parallels that of the crashing waves, it is the surge of bodies which reinforces the highly dramatic composition. The deep darkness of both the base of the waves and the foreground of the raft rises towards a lighter yet equally impactful crescent near the top of the image.
In discourse around the effective formal elements of this work it is noted that the composition is made up of conjoining pyramidal structures. The first involves much of the raft, and spans from the tip of its mast and reaches down towards two of the three corners shown in the painting. The second contains the primary center of emotional charge. These elements contribute to the rising action of the piece as they form the emotional hierarchy which is meant to bring the viewer out of the despair of the foreground and into the energy of the pyramidal peak.
The work was both criticized and praised for its depiction of humanity as in some ways lacking a truly unblemished hero. Due to the chaotic nature of the work: the drowning and dead bodies riddled against the foreground, the trampled heap of survivors surging up the canvas, the dark skin of the highest figure, many of Gericault’s academic audience felt that the painting gave them no respite from the horrors of the scene. There was no saving grace in their eyes as all that was shown was the harshness of reality where the presence of heroism or justice were never truly certain. This was a deeply troubling motif, but one that helped shape the style of the Romantic movement in painting. The freedom which came from this notion that humanity was at the helm of its own wayward destiny inspired a transportation away from the rules and rhetoric of Neoclassicism towards a more liberating Romanticism.
Throughout his career, Gericault’s emphasis on death and decay eventually reach further than simply a fascination with the subject. It is ultimately analogous with his views on the nature of France and life under the restoration monarchy. His confrontational views were shared with many of his countrymen and it is because of this that his work was greeted with a divided reaction by academics upon its completion. At the salon of 1819 where it was displayed many voices contributed to its complicated recognition. The king appeared some days before the exhibition and thoroughly endorsed the work, an act which must have been viewed as a sort of political attempt at a quelling of emotions which the painting was sure to arouse. Other members of the Neoclassicist genre found their appropriate critiques of the piece, referring to the figures as distasteful images of morbidity. Ultimately, the painting was well received by the public but the subject matter kept it from gaining the renown Gericault had hoped for.
From this he brought his painting to London in search of greater recognition, and more importantly a buyer. He arranged for the work to be shown in Piccadilly at the Egyptian Hall. The exhibition went on from July 1820 until the end of that year. Due to the nature of the venue, Gericault received a cut from the sale of tickets which amounted to around 20,000 francs. This deal was certainly the best bet for the artist as this was much more than he could have hoped for from a governmental purchase of his work.
Though the process was rather involved, and the reception was two sided, Gericault’s Medusa remained highly valued in the romantic paradigm. Today the piece is still recognized as an incredibly significant work of his but also as a stunning example of both his artistic competency and attunement with the operations of society and politics. The controversy of his subject matter and style ensured that his work would be remembered if not simply spoken of. Gericault was a driving force of both stylistic shifts as well as political change as the Bourbon restoration would see it’s final decade in the years after this works completion. His short life only furthered his mythologized image of a true romantic; and eclectic figure who influenced the next generation of artists after him through captivating expressions of modernity and the creation of a new mode of social commentary. One that made use of these new audiences to whom the art world was just beginning to open up. Painting, among other practices, was fully embracing its societal role as a harbinger of change and reformation with pieces like The Raft of the Medusa demonstrating this capacity.
Crary, Jonathan. “Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Grey Room 9 (Fall 2002): 7-25.
Guilbaut, Serge and Maureen Ryan. Theodore Gericault The Alien Body and Tradition in Chaos (UBC)
Biome, Albert. “Portraying Monomaniacs to Service the Alienistʼs Monomania: Gericault and Georget” Oxford Art Journal 14:1 1991, 79-91.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360279?pq-origsite=summon&seq=8#page_scan_tab_contents
Lorenz Eitner, Géricault, 1982, 1
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