The revolutionary movement of the Romanticists, which was to find a
strong leader in Eugène Delacroix, may be said to have been initiated
by Géricault’s epoch-making picture _The Raft of the Medusa_ (No. 338,
Plate XLVI.). Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), a pupil of Carle Vernet
and Guérin, was an unusually gifted draughtsman, who from the outset
strove to go beyond the dead perfection of the David school, and to
infuse into his work the spark of life. The _Raft of the Medusa_, which
caused an enormous stir at the Salon of 1819, was inspired by a tragic
incident from actual life; and Géricault was the first who dared to
represent in all its horrible reality this scene of human suffering—the
survivors of a shipwreck driven by hunger to madness and mutual
destruction. He set aside all arbitrarily ignored canons of formal
beauty and the “grand style,” and applied himself to depicting fierce
passions and emotions.
Géricault was a passionate lover of horses; but his knowledge of equine
anatomy did not prevent him, in his portrait of an _Officer of the
Guard_ (No. 339), from exaggerating the action of the charging horse to
a point dangerously near the border-line between the sublime and the
ridiculous. Most of his other pictures at the Louvre are studies of
soldiers, and horses on the race-course or in the stable. He died in
1824 from the effects of a fall from a horse.