Géricault

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) embodies the brilliance of romantic genius, consumed by a relentless quest for truth that led him to revolutionize French painting in the early 19th century. Trained in the studio of Carle Vernet and then Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, this fiery temperament quickly broke free from neoclassical conventions to develop a body of work where the violence of human passions is expressed through nervous brushwork and an intensely contrasted palette. His stays in Italy and England nourished a modern sensibility that culminated in “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819), a manifesto painting where tragic current events are transmuted into a universal allegory of the human condition. His attention to outcasts – the insane, the tortured, bruised bodies – testifies to an acute social conscience served by anatomical studies of obsessive precision. Prematurely carried away by illness, Géricault left behind a body of work whose emotional power and pictorial density paved the way for Delacroix and all pictorial modernity, making him not only a precursor of romanticism but also a lucid witness to the political and existential tensions of his time.

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