Théodore Géricault

Many apologies that I've missed several days worth of updates; I've been moving back to Harvard and spending time at Brandeis and, on the whole, being too busy to blog. But I promise not to abandon you!

Théodore Géricault was a really important early French Romantic painter. He's best known for a painting called The Raft of the Medusa, which depicts a real-life event: a bunch of shipwreck survivors, who had been abandoned by their captain, drift on the title raft. Around the bottom left, many weakened survivors lie piled on top of each other; at the upper right, men twirl red and white cloth, trying to attract ships.

To the left is an earlier work, The Charging Chasseur, showing a Napoleonic cavalry officer. Compare the diagonal features of both works; it's a motif that shows up often in Gericault's work.