The Raft of the Medusa, by Théodore Géricault

The Raft of the Medusa, by Théodore Géricault, can be seen today in the Louvre, Paris. It depicts a real event, and the painting was created with the purpose of drawing attention to that event. The story of the painting itself is nearly as dramatic as that of the scene it depicts.

Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) belonged to the Romantic school of French painting, having been greatly influenced by writers such as Scott and Byron and painters including Rubens, Caravaggio and Michelangelo. He came from a wealthy family and so was never in danger of starving in a garret in the preferred Romantic style, but was free to indulge his passion for horses and travel. His many riding accidents contributed to his early death, at the age of 32, which seemed to tally with the Romantic ideal.

His productive period as an artist lasted for only 12 years, but during that time he produced some startling works, the most dramatic of which was The Raft of the Medusa, a massive painting that occupied him for about 18 months in total but had a decidedly mixed reception when it was exhibited.

The wreck of the Medusa

The incident depicted on the canvas was one that had captured public attention and had political overtones. The Medusa was a French transport frigate that was part of a convoy of three ships sailing to Senegal in 1816 with around 400 passengers and crew, most of the passengers hoping to settle in the new African colony. The ship was captained by an aristocrat who had very little sailing experience but knew all the right people. His incompetence led to the Medusa running aground on a reef some 60 miles off the African coast and the passengers and crew taking to the lifeboats.

However, there was not enough space in the lifeboats, so a raft was hastily constructed for the remaining passengers, to be towed behind the lifeboats. 146 men (and one woman) boarded the raft, but after a few days the raft was deliberately set loose, for fear that it would impede the progress of the boats, and it floated free for the next two weeks. Their only water supply was soon lost, leaving them with only wine to drink, and the food ran out after the first day.

When the raft was eventually spotted by a rescue ship, only fifteen passengers were left alive, having suffered terribly and having had to eat the bodies of those who had died. There had been fighting on board, caused by panic and drunkenness, and a number of passengers had been killed or fell from the raft.

The event caused a huge scandal when the news reached France, being seen as an example of the incompetence of the new post-Napoleonic government under King Louis XVIII. The accounts of the event given by survivors were horrific in the extreme, and Géricault saw an opportunity to make a name for himself by depicting it on canvas.

Gericault’s preparations

Géricault went to a huge amount of trouble to research the event, including interviewing three of the survivors. He visited morgues and hospitals so that he could portray dead and dying bodies accurately, and he built a scale model of the raft and floated it so that he could see how it would sit in the water. He made a number of preliminary sketches before he decided on the incident to be depicted in the final work, eventually opting for the moment when a rescue ship is spotted and the survivors desperately try to attract its attention.

The preparatory work took some ten months to complete before Géricault got to work on the final canvas, which was about 16 feet high and 18 feet wide. He worked in an unusual way, which was to make an initial sketch of the whole and then complete each figure before starting on the next. Some parts of the canvas would therefore have been in their final state for several months before the work was completed. Géricault was a great admirer of Michelangelo, and this was the method that the latter used when painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The method requires the artist to have a fixed view of the finished work at a very early stage, because it is impossible to make changes later. Michelangelo was working in fresco, where this technique was always required, but, although Géricault did not have this imperative, it seemed to work for him too.

For his models, Géricault was able to use the three survivors whom he had interviewed, so the painting not only had a large degree of authenticity but it was also in part a portrait of some of the people who were actually involved. He had a young assistant who not only mixed the paints and handed Géricault his brushes but also modelled for three of the figures on the raft. Another model was Géricault’s friend and fellow artist Ferdinand Delacroix.

“The Raft of the Medusa”

Despite Géricault’s expressed desire to paint a real scene it cannot be denied that he exaggerated the truth for dramatic effect. The rescue, when it came, took place on a relatively calm sea, but the sea under Géricault’s raft is far from that, as a huge wave threatens it from the upper left of the canvas. We also see more people on the raft than were actually there when the fifteen survivors were taken off. Géricault wanted to show the dead as well as the living, so he included a goodly assortment of corpses, in various agonized poses, to make his point.

The design of the canvas is such that the eye is taken in more than one direction. There are two diagonal lines that one is invited to follow. One is from the dead and dying at the bottom left-hand corner up to the pyramid of survivors towards the top right, with arms outstretched and clothing waved in the hope of being seen by watchers on the ship that can only just be seen on the horizon. Géricault makes it seem as though the hope of rescue is a forlorn one, but in reality the rescue ship would not have been as far away as it seems to be here. A raft, floating on the surface of the sea, would not allow a view of much distance, even to someone standing on a barrel, which is how the man at the top of the pyramid is shown, so if a ship is spotted it would not be as small as the one in the painting.

The second diagonal leads from the right-hand side of the pyramid, up a taught rope to the sail that strains under the wind that must be blowing from right to left, and ends in a high wave that threatens to crash down on the raft. Géricault has used a good measure of artistic licence here. For one thing, the actual raft only had a tiny sail that offered virtually no motive force at all. For another, if the wind was blowing with the strength apparently shown by the billowing sail, it would be raising waves in a direction away from the raft and not towards it.

The colour palette used by the artist is severely limited. Flesh tones and browns are dominant, with the lighting being generally subdued, although there is considerable contrast in the sky between brightness near the horizon and dark storm clouds overhead. This helps to emphasise despair and death close at hand set against hope in the far distance.

The scheme of the painting, with its crossover pattern, thus conveys a sense of panic and chaos, which adds to the mixture of emotions that we are invited to share, namely hope, despair and pity. There is a tension here that adds power but also leaves a sense of uncertainty. Géricault’s intention was clearly to ask questions, the chief one being why this situation has been allowed to come about, where innocent people have been abandoned and sacrificed due to the incompetence and indifference of people in the employ of the Government.

A muted reception

It has to be said that Géricault did not get quite the reception he expected after all his efforts. As the work had taken him so long to complete, the gap between the event and his painting being exhibited had stretched to three years and the general sense of outrage had had time to abate. The guilty parties, in particular the captain of the Medusa, had long since been court-martialled and punished, and there was little to be gained by reviving a story that had already been told.

Although there were many people who were impressed by the power of the work, there were others who were repelled by its subject matter. The taste of the time was more for heroism than tragedy, and so, although The Raft of the Medusa was awarded a gold medal at the 1819 Salon, it was not chosen for the Louvre collection.

Instead, Géricault took the painting to London (despite it being nearly 300 square feet in size!) and exhibited it at a gallery in Piccadilly. Londoners flocked to see it and were far more impressed than the citizens of Paris had been. The painting was on show for six months and Géricault earned more from the entrance fees than he would have done had the Louvre bought it. The British public clearly delighted in a painting that showed France in a bad light, and there was doubtless an element of luridness in the portrayal of dead bodies that appealed to the baser instincts of many.

Ironically, the Louvre did buy the painting from Géricault’s estate after his death, and it can be seen there to this day as a fine example of French Romanticism.

Géricault’s stated ambition was “to shine, to illuminate, to astonish the world”. At least as far as The Raft of the Medusa was concerned, he failed to do so, but the painting still has a message today in that it brings home the human consequences of tragedy. Many terrible things have happened in the world since 1816, but we still need to be reminded of what such events mean to real people who are never just statistics.

© John Welford