The Raft of the Medusa

In June 1816, the French frigate Méduse, captained by Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, departed from Rochefort, bound for the Senegalese port of Saint-Louis. She headed a convoy of three other ships: the storeship Loire, the brig Argus and the corvette Écho. De Chaumareys, a recently returned royalist émigré, had been appointed captain of the frigate by the newly restored Bourbon administration, despite having scarcely sailed in 20 years. After the wreck, public outrage mistakenly attributed responsibility for his appointment to Louis XVIII, though this was a routine naval appointment made within the Ministry of the Navy and far outside the concerns of the monarch. The frigate's mission was to accept the British return of Senegal under the terms of France's acceptance of the Peace of Paris. The appointed French governor of Senegal, Colonel Julien-Désiré Schmaltz, and his wife and daughter were among the passengers. In an effort to make good time, the Méduse overtook the other ships, but due to poor navigation it drifted off course. On 2 July, it ran aground on a sandbank off the West African coast, near today's Mauritania. The collision was widely blamed on the incompetence of De Chaumareys, a returned émigré who lacked experience and ability, but had been granted his commission as a result of an act of political preferment. Efforts to free the ship failed, so, on 5 July, the frightened passengers and crew started an attempt to travel the to the African coast in the frigate's six boats. Although the Méduse was carrying 400 people, including 160 crew, there was space for only about 250 in the boats. The remainder of the ship's complement and half of a contingent of marine infantrymen intended to garrison Senegal—at least 146 men and one woman—were piled onto a hastily built raft, that partially submerged once it was loaded. Seventeen crew members opted to stay aboard the grounded Méduse. The captain and crew aboard the other boats intended to tow the raft, but after only a few miles the raft was turned loose. For sustenance the crew of the raft had only a bag of ship's biscuit (consumed on the first day), two casks of water (lost overboard during fighting) and six casks of wine. According to critic Jonathan Miles, the raft carried the survivors "to the frontiers of human experience. Crazed, parched and starved, they slaughtered mutineers, ate their dead companions and killed the weakest." After 13 days, on 17 July 1816, the raft was rescued by the Argus by chance—no particular search effort was made by the French for the raft. By this time only 15 men were still alive; the others had been killed or thrown overboard by their comrades, died of starvation, or had thrown themselves into the sea in despair. The incident became a huge public embarrassment for the French monarchy, only recently restored to power after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. == Description ==

The Raft of the Medusa portrays the moment when, after 13 days adrift on the raft, the remaining 15 survivors view a ship approaching from a distance. According to an early British reviewer, the work is set at a moment when "the ruin of the raft may be said to be complete". and those in the foreground almost twice life-size, pushed close to the picture plane and crowding onto the viewer, who is drawn into the physical action as a participant. stands on an empty barrel and frantically waves his handkerchief to draw the ship's attention. The pictorial composition of the painting is constructed on a pyramidal structure. The horizontal grouping of dead and dying figures in the foreground forms the base from which the survivors emerge, surging upward towards the emotional peak, where the central figure waves desperately at a rescue ship. Two other diagonal lines are used to heighten the dramatic tension. One follows the mast and its rigging and leads the viewer's eye towards an approaching wave that threatens to engulf the raft, while the second, composed of reaching figures, leads to the distant silhouette of the Argus, the ship that eventually rescued the survivors. The work's lighting has been described as "Caravaggesque", From the distant area of the rescue ship, a bright light shines, providing illumination to an otherwise dull brown scene. == Execution ==

Research and preparatory studies , Lille, France Géricault was captivated by accounts of the widely publicised 1816 shipwreck, and realised that a depiction of the event might be an opportunity to establish his reputation as a painter. Having decided to proceed, he undertook extensive research before he began the painting. In early 1818, he met with two survivors: Henri Savigny, a surgeon, and Alexandre Corréard, an engineer from the École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers. Their emotional descriptions of their experiences largely inspired the tone of the final painting. According to the art historian Georges-Antoine Borias, "Géricault established his studio across from Beaujon hospital. And here began a mournful descent. Behind locked doors he threw himself into his work. Nothing repulsed him. He was dreaded and avoided." Earlier travels had exposed Géricault to victims of insanity and plague, and while researching the Méduse his effort to be historically accurate and realistic led to an obsession with the stiffness of corpses. and for a fortnight drew a severed head, borrowed from a lunatic asylum and stored on his studio roof. He drew and painted numerous preparatory sketches while deciding which of several alternative moments of the disaster he would depict in the final work. The painting's conception proved slow and difficult for Géricault, and he struggled to select a single pictorially effective moment to best capture the inherent drama of the event. Among the scenes he considered were the mutiny against the officers from the second day on the raft, the cannibalism that occurred after only a few days, and the rescue. Géricault ultimately settled on the moment, recounted by one of the survivors, when they first saw, on the horizon, the approaching rescue ship Argus—visible in the upper right of the painting—which they attempted to signal. The ship, however, passed by. In the words of one of the surviving crew members, "From the delirium of joy, we fell into profound despondency and grief." The author Rupert Christiansen points out that the painting depicts more figures than had been on the raft at the time of the rescue—including corpses which were not recorded by the rescuers. Instead of the sunny morning and calm water reported on the day of the rescue, Géricault depicted a gathering storm and dark, heaving sea to reinforce the emotional gloom. Géricault, who was an abolitionist, Most notably, Joseph served as a model for what is considered to be a representation of Jean Charles, a military officer waving a dark red handkerchief in hopes of being noticed by the passing ship. Influenced by an ancient Greek Classical sculpture titled Belvedere Torso and with his back turned toward the viewer, Joseph's silhouette is placed atop the pyramidal grouping of survivors in the composition's right half. In addition, a small rendering of Joseph's face, with his gaze directed toward the spectator, is placed within a group of three figures positioned between the wooden mast and the supporting rope on the mast's right-hand side. File:Couleurs radeau meduse.png|thumb|The main 16 colours used for the painting Working with little distraction, the artist completed the painting in eight months; the project as a whole took 18 months. == Influences ==

The Raft of the Medusa fuses many influences from the Old Masters, from the Last Judgment and Sistine Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael's Transfiguration, to the monumental approach of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), to contemporary events. By the 18th century, shipwrecks had become a recognised feature of marine art – as well as an increasingly common occurrence, for more journeys were made by sea. Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) created many such images, achieving naturalistic colour through direct observation—unlike other artists at that time—and was said to have tied himself to the mast of a ship in order to witness a storm. . Detail of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Géricault said, "Michelangelo sent shivers up my spine, these lost souls destroying each other inevitably conjure up the tragic grandeur of the Sistine Chapel." Although the men depicted on the raft had spent 13 days adrift and suffered hunger, disease and cannibalism, Géricault pays tribute to the traditions of heroic painting and presents his figures as muscular and healthy. According to the art historian Richard Muther, there is still a strong debt to Classicism in the work. The fact that the majority of the figures are almost naked, he wrote, arose from a desire to avoid "unpictorial" costumes. Muther observes that there is "still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death". In 1793, David also painted an important current event with The Death of Marat. His painting had an enormous political impact during the time of the revolution in France, and it served as an important precedent for Géricault's decision to also paint a current event. David's pupil, Antoine-Jean Gros, had, like David, represented "the grandiosities of a school irredeemably associated with a lost cause", but in some major works, he had given equal prominence to Napoleon and anonymous dead or dying figures. Géricault had been particularly impressed by the 1804 painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Victims of Jaffa, by Gros. The foreground figure of the older man may be a reference to Ugolino from Dante's Inferno—a subject that Géricault had contemplated painting—and seems to borrow from a painting of Ugolini by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) that Géricault may have known from prints. In Dante, Ugolino is guilty of cannibalism, which was one of the most sensational aspects of the days on the raft. Géricault seems to allude to this through the borrowing from Fuseli. An early study for The Raft of the Medusa in watercolour, now in the Louvre, is much more explicit, depicting a figure gnawing on the arm of a headless corpse. Several English and American paintings including The Death of Major Pierson by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)—also painted within two years of the event—had established a precedent for a contemporary subject. Copley had also painted several large and heroic depictions of disasters at sea which Géricault may have known from prints: Watson and the Shark (1778), in which a black man is central to the action, and which, like The Raft of the Medusa, concentrated on the actors of the drama rather than the seascape; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (1791), which was an influence on both the style and subject matter of Géricault's work; and Scene of a Shipwreck (1790s), which has a strikingly similar composition. A further important precedent for the political component was the works of Francisco Goya, particularly his The Disasters of War series of 1810–12, and his 1814 masterpiece The Third of May 1808. Goya also produced a painting of a disaster at sea, called simply Shipwreck (date unknown), but although the sentiment is similar, the composition and style have nothing in common with The Raft of the Medusa. It is unlikely that Géricault had seen the picture. == Exhibition and reception ==

The Raft of the Medusa was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, under the title Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene), although its real subject would have been unmistakable for contemporary viewers. The exhibition was sponsored by Louis XVIII and featured nearly 1,300 paintings, 208 sculptures and numerous other engravings and architectural designs. freely translated as "Monsieur Géricault, your shipwreck is certainly no disaster". The critics were divided: the horror and "terribilità" of the subject exercised fascination, but devotees of classicism expressed their distaste for what they described as a "pile of corpses", whose realism they considered a far cry from the "ideal beauty" represented by Girodet's Pygmalion and Galatea, which triumphed the same year. Géricault's work expressed a paradox: how could a hideous subject be translated into a powerful painting, how could the painter reconcile art and reality? Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie, a French painter and contemporary of Géricault, provided one answer: "Monsieur Géricault seems mistaken. The goal of painting is to speak to the soul and the eyes, not to repel." The painting had fervent admirers too, including French writer and art critic Auguste Jal, who praised its political theme, its liberal position–its advancement of the negro and critique of ultra-royalism–and its modernity. The historian Jules Michelet approved: "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa". Géricault had deliberately sought to be both politically and artistically confrontational. Critics responded to his aggressive approach in kind, and their reactions were either ones of revulsion or praise, depending on whether the writer's sympathies favoured the Bourbon or Liberal viewpoint. The painting was seen as largely sympathetic to the men on the raft, and thus by extension to the anti-imperial cause adopted by the survivors Savigny and Corréard. According to art critic and curator Karen Wilkin, Géricault's painting acts as a "cynical indictment of the bungling malfeasance of France's post-Napoleonic officialdom, much of which was recruited from the surviving families of the Ancien Régime". in Piccadilly, London. The painting generally impressed the viewing public, although its subject matter repelled many, thus denying Géricault the popular acclaim which he had hoped to achieve. Géricault arranged for the painting to be exhibited in London in 1820, where it was shown at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, from 10 June until the end of the year, and viewed by about 40,000 visitors. During this time, it also upstaged Christ's Entry into Jerusalem by Benjamin Haydon. The reception in London was more positive than that in Paris, and the painting was hailed as representative of a new direction in French art. It received more positive reviews than when it was shown at the Salon. In part, this was due to the manner of the painting's exhibition: in Paris it had initially been hung high in the Salon Carré—a mistake that Géricault recognised when he saw the work installed—but in London it was placed close to the ground, emphasising its monumental impact. There may have been other reasons for its popularity in England as well, including "a degree of national self-congratulation", the appeal of the painting as lurid entertainment, From the London exhibition Géricault earned close to 20,000 francs, which was his share of the fees charged to visitors, and substantially more than he would have been paid had the French government purchased the work from him. After the London exhibition, Bullock brought the painting to Dublin early in 1821, but the exhibition there was far less successful, in large part due to a competing exhibition of a moving panorama, "The Wreck of the Medusa" by the Marshall brothers firm, which was said to have been painted under the direction of one of the survivors of the disaster. and Étienne-Antoine-Eugène Ronjat, a full size copy, 1859–60, 493 cm × 717 cm, Musée de Picardie, Amiens It was bought by a former admiral, Uriah Phillips, who left it in 1862 to the New York Historical Society, where it was miscatalogued as by Gilbert Stuart and remained inaccessible until the mistake was uncovered in 2006, after an enquiry by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, a professor of art history at the University of Delaware. The university's conservation department undertook restoration of the work. Because of deterioration in the condition of Géricault's original, the Louvre in 1859–60 commissioned two French artists, Pierre-Désiré Guillemet and , to make a full size copy of the original for loan exhibitions. In the autumn of 1939, the Medusa was packed for removal from the Louvre in anticipation of the outbreak of war. A scenery truck from the Comédie-Française transported the painting to Versailles in the night of 3 September. Some time later, the Medusa was moved to the Château de Chambord where it remained until after the end of the Second World War. == Interpretation and legacy ==

In its insistence on portraying an unpleasant truth, The Raft of the Medusa was a landmark in the emerging Romantic movement in French painting, and "laid the foundations of an aesthetic revolution" against the prevailing Neoclassical style. Géricault's compositional structure and depiction of the figures are classical, but the contrasting turbulence of the subject represents a significant change in artistic direction and creates an important bridge between Neoclassical and Romantic styles. By 1815, Jacques-Louis David, then in exile in Brussels, was both the leading proponent of the popular history painting genre, which he had perfected, and a master of the Neoclassical style. In France, both history painting and the Neoclassical style continued through the work of Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, François Gérard, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin—teacher of both Géricault and Delacroix—and other artists who remained committed to the artistic traditions of David and Nicolas Poussin. In his introduction to The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, Hubert Wellington wrote about Delacroix's opinion of the state of French painting just prior to the Salon of 1819. According to Wellington, "The curious blend of classic with realistic outlook which had been imposed by the discipline of David was now losing both animation and interest. The master himself was nearing his end, and exiled in Belgium. His most docile pupil, Girodet, a refined and cultivated classicist, was producing pictures of astonishing frigidity. Gérard, immensely successful painter of portraits under the Empire—some of them admirable—fell in with the new vogue for large pictures of history, but without enthusiasm." Géricault's raft pointedly lacks a hero, and his painting presents no cause beyond sheer survival. The work represents, in the words of Christine Riding, "the fallacy of hope and pointless suffering, and at worst, the basic human instinct to survive, which had superseded all moral considerations and plunged civilised man into barbarism". They argue that the artist's choice to do so was not a "last-minute" decision as evidenced by early sketches for the work, including a portrait study of the Haitian model Joseph, and point to Géricault's concerns regarding the "extreme cruelties" of illegal slave trade in the French colonies. Gericault’s choice to place the Black man as the active “hero” deviated from popular ideas about enslaved people. The subject of marine tragedy was undertaken by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), who, like many English artists, probably saw Géricault's painting when it was exhibited in London in 1820. His A Disaster at Sea () chronicled a similar incident, this time a British catastrophe, with a swamped vessel and dying figures also placed in the foreground. Placing a person of color in the centre of the drama was revisited by Turner, with similar abolitionist overtones, in his The Slave Ship (1840). The art historian Albert Elsen believed that The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix's Massacre at Chios provided the inspiration for the grandiose sweep of Auguste Rodin's monumental sculpture The Gates of Hell. He wrote that "Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and Géricault's Raft of the Medusa confronted Rodin on a heroic scale with the innocent nameless victims of political tragedies ... If Rodin was inspired to rival Michelangelo's Last Judgment, he had Géricault's Raft of the Medusa in front of him for encouragement." For Kenneth Clark, the painting is the "chief example of romantic pathos expressed through the nude; and that obsession with death, which drove Géricault to frequent mortuary chambers and places of public execution, gives truth to his figures of the dead and the dying. Their outlines may be taken from the classics, but they have been seen again with a craving for violent experience." and to record people, places and events in real, everyday surroundings. The 2004 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet: The Bruyas Collection from the Musee Fabre, Montpellier, sought to compare the 19th-century Realist painters Courbet, Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), and early Édouard Manet (1832–1883) with artists associated with Romanticism, including Géricault and Delacroix. Citing The Raft of the Medusa as an instrumental influence on Realism, the exhibition drew comparisons between all of the artists. The critic Michael Fried sees Manet directly borrowing the figure of the man cradling his son for the composition of Angels at the Tomb of Christ. In comtemporary art historical discourse, artist Luc Tuymans has referenced The Raft of the Medusa as an influence, noting its impact on his approach to composition and the representation of historical imagery. File:David - The Death of Socrates.jpg|Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates 1787, 129.5 cm × 196.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art. David represented the Neoclassical style, from which Géricault sought to break. File:Gros - Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau cropped.png|Antoine-Jean Gros, detail from Napoleon on the battlefield of Eylau, 1807, Louvre. Like Gros, Géricault had seen and felt the exhilaration of violence, and was distraught by the human consequences. File:Joseph Mallord William Turner - A Disaster at Sea - Google Art Project.jpg|J. M. W. Turner, A Disaster at Sea (also known as The Wreck of the Amphitrite), , 171.5 cm × 220.5 cm, Tate, London. Turner probably saw Géricault's painting when it was exhibited in London in 1820. File:Winslow Homer - The Gulf Stream - Metropolitan Museum of Art.jpg|Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899, 71.5 cm × 124.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art File:Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand Auckland Art Gallery.jpg|Louis John Steele and Charles Goldie, 1899, 138  cm × 245 cm, Auckland Art Gallery. The artists were familiar with Géricault's painting and it influenced their work The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand. ==See also==

• Alhadeff, Albert. The Raft of the Medusa: Géricault, Art, and Race, Prestel, 2002, . • Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. . Chapter 5, Shipwreck, is an analysis of the painting. • Barnes, Julian. "Géricault: Catastrophe into Art", in Barnes, Julian. Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, pp.  13-41. Barnes describes the actual shipwreck and the extent to which the painting reflects it. • Berger, Klaus. Gericault: Drawings & Watercolors. New York: H. Bittner and Company, 1946. • Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Counterrevolution 1815–1848. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. . • Borias, Georges-Antoine. ''Géricault: The Raft of the 'Medusa''' (film). The Roland Collection of Films on Art. Directed by Touboul, Adrien, 1968. • Eitner, Lorenz. ''Géricault's 'Raft of the Medusa'''. New York: Phaidon, 1972. . • Eitner, Lorenz. 19th Century European Painting: David to Cézanne. Westview Press, 2002. . • Elsen, Albert. The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin. Stanford University Press, 1985. . • Fried, Michael. ''Manet's Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. . • Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, (a study of the works of Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix). Yale University Press, 2002. . • Hagen, Rose-Marie & Hagen, Rainer. What Great Paintings Say. Vol. 1. Taschen, 2007 (25th ed.). 374–377. . • McKee, Alexander. Wreck of the Medusa: The Tragic Story of the Death Raft. London: Souvenir Press, 1975. . • • Miles, Jonathan. The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007. . • Muther, Richard. The History of Modern Painting Vol. 1. London: J.M. Dent, 1907. • Néret, Gilles. Eugène Delacroix: The Prince of Romanticism. Taschen, 2000. . • Nicholas, Lynn H. (1994). ''The Rape of Europa: the Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. . . • Noon, Patrick & Bann, Stephen. Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism. London: Tate Publishing, 2003. . (See also "Riding" below.) • Novotny, Fritz. Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780 to 1880. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960. • Riding, Christine. "The Raft of the Medusa in Britain". In: Noon, Patrick & Bann, Stephen. Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism. London: Tate Publishing, June 2003. . • Riding, Christine. "The Fatal Raft: Christine Riding Looks at British Reaction to the French Tragedy at Sea Immortalised in Gericault's Masterpiece 'The Raft of the Medusa' History Today, February 2003. • Rowe Snow, Edward. Tales of Terror and Tragedy. New York: Dodd Mead, 1979. . • Savigny, Jean Baptiste Henri; Corréard, Alexandre. Undertaken by Order of the French Government, Comprising an Account of the Shipwreck of the Medusa, the Sufferings of the Crew, and the Various Occurrences on Board the Raft, in the Desert of Zaara, at St. Louis, and at the Camp of Daccard. To which are Subjoined Observations Respecting the Agriculture of the Western Coast of Africa, from Cape Blanco to the Mouth of the Gambia. London: Cockburn, 1818. • . • Wintle, Justin. Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture. London: Routledge, 2001. . ==External links==