Théodore GéricaultFrench, 1791–1824Étude de cheval gris
May one see it?
Unknown
Béziers, France
The owner is known; whether it is on view today is not.
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
Particulars
- Accession number
- 896.1.18 ; 77 (Catalogue Fayet 1904) ; C 7 (numéro de collectionneur)
What it shows
In the catalog
Sources
- Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers
- Image: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers — Collections des Musées de la ville de Béziers; Ministère de la Culture (France), base Joconde
Meanwhile, in the life of Théodore Géricault
The whole life5 February 1811 · Education
Beaux-Arts de Paris
1812
Salon debut: “Officer of the Imperial Guard Chasseurs”
In 1812 Géricault sent “Portrait of Dieudonné” (now “Officer of the Imperial Guard Chasseurs Charging”, Louvre) to the Paris Salon. An artist unknown until then, said to have “hardly studied”, he at once drew the critics' attention: Boutard advised him to take up battle painting, Durdent called him “perhaps the best of all our painters”, and David himself noticed the picture.
autumn 1817
The book on the wreck of the Méduse reaches Géricault
In the autumn of 1817 the book “The Wreck of the Frigate Medusa” appeared, in which the eyewitnesses, the geographer-engineer Alexandre Corréard and the physician Henri Savigny, described the thirteen-day drift of the raft after the ship ran aground off the coast of Mauritania. The book reached Géricault, who saw in it the subject for the large painting he had long dreamed of.
1817–1818
Investigating the disaster: survivors, a model raft, morgues
Géricault re-created the event by studying the available materials and meeting witnesses: he got to know Corréard and Savigny, a carpenter from the Méduse made a scale model of the raft for him, and the artist modelled wax figures himself. He visited hospital morgues, drawing dead heads, emaciated bodies and severed limbs, and the preparation ended with a trip to Le Havre, where he painted studies of sea and sky.
1819
“The Raft of the Medusa” sparks a political controversy at the Salon
When first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819, “The Raft of the Medusa” ignited political controversy: it indicted a corrupt establishment, in which the captain had left the crew and passengers to die, but also dramatized the eternal struggle of man against nature.
26 January 1824
Died
