Dali House

Theodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”, 1819
Click the image to see it much larger.

Most compelling in history? Those are my words. There is monstrous magic in this huge argument in oil, in the public reaction to it, in the political ramifications, in the vast creative influence it had in its time, in the echoes that resonate to this day … and that’s all before you get to the chilling story behind it.

Prick a hole in the Internet and so much commentary about Theodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” flows out that you find yourself afloat at sea as well. The words fly in all directions. One neocon has an elaborate thesis on the web that uses the artwork to scoff at enemies of economic globalisation. I think it deserves more respect.

“An image of hope being mocked”, Julian Barnes called it in one of the best books I’ve ever read, “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters”. The Medusa’s doom shares space there with Noah’s salvation, and the similarities shimmer like sunlight (or lightning) on waves as the two tales race toward fatally different outcomes.
The passengers in both odysseys squabble – Noah and kin eat their animals, the raft riders one another; those on the raft decide to throw the dying and ill overboard to conserve provisions, separating “the clean from the unclean”, as Noah did; it was a “miracle” that two Medusa castaways survived, yet 135 of the “unclean” perished.

“How do you turn catastrophe into art?” Barnes asked. By rearranging the facts, shifting the shape of human history so it’s somehow rational, palateable, as Géricault did by painting 20 men on his raft, not 15. He dragged five of the wounded back from the sea because, as Barnes put it, “Should the dead lose their vote in the referendum over hope versus despair?”

Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), the son of a Rouen lawyer who did everything he could think of to stop his son from becoming an artist, was all for giving the dead a vote, even if he had to raise their severed, half-chewed arms on their behalf.

Géricault wanted to give optimism and pessimism a level playing field on which to decide the forecast for human destiny. He depicted the very moment at which the survivors sighted a rescue vessel on the distant horizon, and on this vision fate’s wager rested. The viewer’s prejudice might choose whether the ship is approaching or moving further away – except that almost everyone who’s ever seen the painting already knew its course.
“We are all lost at sea,” Barnes wrote, “washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”

The basics of the tragedy:

On June 17, 1816, France’s new Bourbon government dispatched the frigates Medusa, Loire and Echo and the brig Argus to officially receive the British handover of the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal to France. The British, having restored the French monarchy, wanted to show their support for Louis XVIII, and were willing to give him the trading port.
The Medusa was to carry 365 crew and passengers, including Senegal’s governor-designate, Colonel Julien-Désire Schmaltz, from Port de Rochefort on the island of Aix on France’s west coast, to Senegal via Tenerife.

Captain Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys, 53, had spent most of his career sailing a desk at customs offices. His crew was appalled that a man who had never skippered a ship, let alone a fleet, was able to use his royalist connections to secure such a post.
Schmaltz wanted to reach St Louis as fast as possible, and against the objections of the crew, de Chaumereys plotted a course dangerously close to the shoreline. Within days mishaps seemed to presage disaster: a cabin boy was lost overboard; De Chaumareys quarrelled with his crew and passengers; the faster Medusa left the rest of the fleet behind.

On the morning of July 2, poor seamanship and worse navigation ran the Medusa aground in calm seas and clear weather on what was most likely the Arguin Banks off the coast of Mauritania. The hole in its hull was irreparable.
The next day the weather fouled as realisation set in that the four (some sources say six) lifeboats were wholly inadequate.
A raft measuring roughly 65 by 23 feet was built of masts and crossbeams and seats allotted. The ship was abandoned, 17 holdouts still aboard. The lifeboats were to tow the raft, which was carrying 150 passengers with a naval officer in command.
By the time of a third of the raft occupants had boarded it, however, it was underwater. Food supplies were jettisoned in a bid to float it, and it rose to within a metre of the surface, good enough, they supposed, to set off.

The semi-submerged, heavily laden raft naturally proved a hard pull. It didn’t take long for those on the lifeboats to decide, for reasons later encapsulated as “self-interest, incompetence, misfortune or seeming necessity”, to cut the ropes, four miles offshore.
The raft had no oars, rudder or navigation equipment, and by the second day three of its passengers had already committed suicide. That night the rest dived into their store of rum, then the drunken soldiers took up arms against the officers, killing several. By dawn 60 people remained alive, but by now, though only knee-deep in water rather than waist-deep, they were engulfed in delirium. Starving, some began eating the corpses, others their own faeces.

Over the next week there was more mutiny, murder and cannibalism. The 15 survivors on an increasingly buoyant raft were at one point befuddled by the visit of a white butterfly to their makeshift sail. Some were ecstatic at a possible sign of nearby land, some by the appearance of a morsel of food. Some saw a divine message, some a mockery of their plight.
The pessimists seemed vindicated when more days passed with no sign of land, the optimists when, on the 13th day, they were discovered by the Argus, almost by accident.

The 15 remaining were taken to Saint-Louis, where five died within days. Three of the 17 men who’d stayed on the Medusa were found alive (though quite mad from starvation) by a British ship, which got them back to France after the French Marine Minister failed to act.

The Medusa’s surgeon, Henri Savigny, submitted his account to the authorities, but it was leaked to an anti-Bourbon newspaper, the Journal des débats, and published on September 13, causing a scandal that politicians attempted in vain to dampen by covering up the facts. De Chaumereys was ultimately found culpable and court-martialed in Port de Rochefort.
The following year Savigny and ship’s geographer Alexander Corréard released a joint account that went through five printings in four years and carried the story to England as well.
Tales of the rescue and the horrors that preceded it held France in a dangerous grip. Guilt stalked the streets in search of fresh victims.

Géricault, then 25, found himself obsessed. For months the great painter wrestled with visions, and by the time he decided in late February 1818 that he would have to commit one of them to canvas, he was so committed that he shaved his head like an ascetic and hung a sign on his door forbidding all entry apart from his students and models (among them his friend Eugène Delacroix, who is the figure in the foreground with his face to the ground and arms outstretched).

First he studied scenes of battle, torment and death in the works of the masters, like Michelangelo, Rubens and Gros, searching for the appropriate expressions for his subjects.

He painted furiously, one version after another, from a scale model of the raft, wax models of the survivors and sketches of severed heads and dissected limbs he’d made at the morgue of the Hospital Beaujon. He must have played out every human emotion in reliving the terrors of the raft and the hopelessness of its abandoned occupants. He could not possibly have fended off conclusions about exactly where the blame lay.

An earlier version of the painting.
Click the image to see it much larger.

Initially he placed the raft farther away from the viewer, its passengers facing out toward us. Then he turned them around so they were looking into the distance and brought the raft nearer, practically putting us on board. He wanted our sympathy. An earlier version almost had us in their midst, with victims both near and far stationed at the alert as a small boat approaches. In the final version that boat has slipped away on a current of literal disillusionment.

The horizon isn’t horizontal, it’s a plunging recession, and Géricault bolsters the drama by vastly foreshortening the scene, the nearest figures pushing the horizon even further back. A tiny gap separates the men from the distant speck that signifies their ability to live on, love again, lust another day.

The resulting effect, which seems to have been deliberate, is that the men’s straining for salvation is all the more acute. The rescue vessel pulling away draws on their muscles like the rope in a tug-of-war against some colossal promise being stolen away. Their grasp on survival is excruciatingly taut. Even the spectator is left breathless watching the struggle.

What finally emerged nevertheless, as Barnes discovered in researching his own version of events, was equivocation. Géricault was fearfully cautious in trying to avoid an encounter with the nationwide controversy at the core of the story. He opted to shun the political, the symbolic, the theatrical, the shocking and the sentimental, and in doing so told a lie.

A 35-square-metre lie.

The painting was unveiled as “Scene de naufrage” (”Scene of Shipwreck”; it’s now titled “Le Radeau de la Medusa“, or “The Raft of the Medusa“) at the Paris Salon in 1819, and people stood in line and paid admission to see it. But the critics, expecting the customary political or at least philosophical statement, particularly given such a huge canvas, immediately complained that neither the nationality of the victims nor the place and time could be read in the painting.
Nor was there any sign of a higher power, neither God nor the emperor, as was expected in those days. There is no hero, no message, no saint, no monarch, no evidence of cause, no inevitable effect. There is no justification here for what happened on the Arguin Banks.

Is the ship on the horizon the Argus? Is it approaching or vanishing? Which of the riders of the raft are hopeful, which in despair? Why is no one wounded, why are they all “full of muscle and dynamism”, as Barnes put it? Géricault filled his vast canvas with contradiction. Barnes speculated that the painter gave his victims vigour because he wanted to detach them from a particular historical event so they could more bravely represent mankind’s larger predicament, that of being trapped by political circumstance, the have-nots abandoned by the haves.

Gericault’s studio was in the Rue des Martyrs.

Géricault has hoisted history’s anchor and sailed off into allegory. “The picture’s secret,” Barnes wrote, “lies in the pattern of its energy. Look at it one more time: at the violent waterspout building up through those muscular backs as they reach for the speck of the rescuing vessel. All that straining – to what end? There is no formal response to the painting’s main surge, just as there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) – how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve?”

@ @ @ @ @

Whatever happened to our confounded friend Géricault? His hair grew back, and, since his compatriots didn’t much care for his painting, he took it to England in 1820, where it received much praise. In fact it went on tour around Europe.
At the London show at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, it drew 40,000 visitors. Among them was JMW Turner, who was to be inspired not only by Géricault’s dramatic composition but also by its political subtext.

In Turner’s “Disaster at Sea”, the lives lost in a shipwreck were female convicts on their way to Australia, and his canvas too is an indictment of official incompetence and cruelty. The prison ship refused French aid during a storm; more than 100 women drowned.

When “The Raft” was eventually put up for sale, a wealthy Englishman made a bid, as did a consortium of French nobility who planned to chop it into pieces for auction. Louis XVIII stepped in to prevent the work from being lost to London or hacked to bits and, even though it was interpreted as anti-monarchist, he donated the painting to the Louvre. It’s in Salle 77 of the Denon wing, stealing the show from its wall-mates by Gros, Delaroch and Delacroix.

Géricault remained in England for two years, hanging out with the horsey set and producing a body of lithographs, watercolours and oils of jockeys and their mounts. His “The Horse Race at Epsom”, seen here, was much celebrated.

In the two remaining years of his life, Géricault’s friendship with Étienne Georget, a pioneer in psychiatric studies, inspired a series of portraits of victims of insanity and other maladies of the mind. Shown here is “Woman with a Gambling Mania” from 1822. Perhaps he understood the mentally unhinged better now.
He went riding, and fell off his horse a lot. He contracted tuberculosis and suffered for ages before dying in Paris in 1824.

Now he reclines in bronze with a brush in his hand atop his tomb at the famed Père Lachaise cemetery, not far from Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde and a lot of other crazies. His sepulchre has a low-relief panel of “The Raft of the Medusa“. Someone mentioned the painting to him on his death bed. Géricault said, “Bah, une vignette!”

There emerged in colloquial French an expression, “Je suis médusé”, meaning “I am dumbfounded”.

There’s a detailed analysis of how Géricault painstakingly arrived at his composition at Anna Tse’s website.
And a remarkable Flash study of the painting’s fractal geometry, with social commentary here.
See the painting converted to typewriting here.
And try to see the humour in the story at HistoryHouse.com.
There’s also a mention on the web of a French marine archaeological expedition finding the Medusa wreck in 1980, using state-of-the-art electronic search equipment, but I’ve been unable to find any details.