Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault is a French Romantic painter, meteor of modern art whose dazzling and innovative work paves the way for Romanticism and Realism. Trained in the Neoclassical studio of Guérin but fascinated by Rubens and Michelangelo, he develops a dramatic style characterized by impetuous dynamism, powerful chiaroscuro and passionate attention to the movement of human and animal bodies, particularly horses whose wild energy he captures with incomparable virtuosity. His monumental masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1819), manifesto-painting of nascent Romanticism, shocks and fascinates through its brutal realism - corpses, despair, cannibalism - and its critical political charge against the Restoration government, marking a radical break with Neoclassical idealism. In his final years, he paints an overwhelming series of portraits of the insane for his friend the alienist physician Georget, works of stunning empathy and modernity that probe the fragility of the human psyche. Dying prematurely at age 32 from the effects of a horse fall in 1824, he leaves a limited body of work but of an intensity and audacity that profoundly influence Delacroix and all European Romanticism.