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Painting by Théodore Géricault
the painting

The Raft of the Medusa ( lə ʁado d(ə) la medyz) – originally titled Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene) – is an oil painting of 1818–19 by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. At , it is an over life size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism (one custom of the sea). The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain. Géricault chose this large scale uncommissioned work to launch his career, using a subject that had already generated widespread public interest. The event fascinated him, and before he began work on the final painting, he undertook extensive research and produced many preparatory sketches. He interviewed two of the survivors and constructed a detailed scale model of the raft. He visited hospitals and morgues where he could view, first hand, the colour and texture of the flesh of the dying and dead. As he had anticipated, the painting proved highly controversial at its first appearance in the 1819 Paris Salon, attracting passionate praise and condemnation in equal measure. However, it established his international reputation and today is widely seen as seminal in the early history of the Romantic movement in French painting. Although The Raft of the Medusa retains elements of the traditions of history painting, in both its choice of subject matter and its dramatic presentation, it represents a break from the calm and order of the prevailing Neoclassical school. Géricault's work attracted wide attention from its first showing and was then exhibited in London. The Louvre acquired it soon after the artist's death at age 32. The painting's influence can be seen in the works of Eugène Delacroix, J. M. W. Turner, Gustave Courbet, and Édouard Manet.

In June 1816, the French frigate Méduse, captained by 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. Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys, 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 100 mile (161 km) 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 Chaumereys, 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 60 mile (97 km) 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.

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 upon two pyramidal structures. The perimeter of the large mast on the left of the canvas forms the first. 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. The viewer's attention is first drawn to the centre of the canvas, then follows the directional flow of the survivors' bodies, viewed from behind and straining to the right. 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. 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. 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". 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. 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. [[File:Raft of the Medusa copy par Pierre Désiré Guillemet et Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat. jpg|thumb|left|Copy of the work by Pierre Désiré Guillemet 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 fr, 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.

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 (c. 1835) 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." While Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) could be described as an anti Romantic painter, his major works like A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) and The Artist's Studio (1855) owe a debt to The Raft of the Medusa. The influence is not only in Courbet's enormous scale, but in his willingness to portray ordinary people and current political events, 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. The influence of The Raft of the Medusa was felt by artists beyond France. Francis Danby, a British painter born in Ireland, probably was inspired by Géricault's picture when he painted Sunset at Sea after a Storm in 1824, and wrote in 1829 that The Raft of the Medusa was "the finest and grandest historical picture I have ever seen". The Gulf Stream (1899), by the American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910), replicates the composition of The Raft of the Medusa with a damaged vessel, ominously surrounded by sharks and threatened by a waterspout. Like Géricault, Homer makes a black man the pivotal figure in the scene, though here he is the vessel's sole occupant. A ship in the distance mirrors the Argus from Géricault's painting. The move from the drama of Romanticism to the new Realism is exemplified by the stoic resignation of Homer's figure. The man's condition, which in earlier works might have been characterised by hope or helplessness, has turned to "sullen rage". Remarking on the contrast between the dying figures in the foreground and the figures in the mid ground waving towards the approaching rescue ship, the French art historian Georges Antoine Borias wrote that Géricault's painting represents, "on the one hand, desolation and death. On the other, hope and life." For Kenneth Clark, The Raft of the Medusa "remains 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."

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. Berger, Klaus & Gaericault, Thaeodore. 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. .