Théodore GéricaultFrance, 1791–1824Étude de cheval gris
Peut-on la contempler ?
Inconnu
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers
Béziers, France
Le propriétaire est connu ; on ignore si l’œuvre est exposée aujourd’hui.
- Dans cet état depuis
- Source
- Le musée
Notice
- Numéro d’inventaire
- 896.1.18 ; 77 (Catalogue Fayet 1904) ; C 7 (numéro de collectionneur)
Pendant ce temps, chez Théodore Géricault
La vie entière5 février 1811 · Formation
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
