On 2 July 1816, the French frigate Medusa ran aground on the Bank of Arguin, off the coast of present-day Mauritania. The ship had been carrying troops, settlers, and supplies to re-establish the French colony at Saint-Louis in Senegal, returned to France by the British under the terms of the post-Napoleonic settlement. The captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, had been appointed for political reasons by the restored Bourbon government despite having spent twenty years out of service. He had run aground because he had refused to listen to his more experienced officers.

There were not enough lifeboats. Six lifeboats carried 250 officers, sailors, and first-class passengers safely to shore. The remaining 147 people were placed on an improvised raft, twenty metres long and seven metres wide, constructed from the ship's masts and yards lashed together. The raft was to be towed to shore behind the lifeboats. Several kilometres from the wreck, the lifeboat crews cut the towlines and left the raft to drift.

The Thirteen Days

The raft drifted for thirteen days in the open Atlantic. The 147 people on board had a small supply of biscuits, several barrels of wine, and no fresh water. By the second night they had begun to fight; by the fourth night they had begun to die. The strong attacked the weak. The wine was drunk. The biscuits ran out. By the fifth day, some of the survivors had begun to eat the bodies of the dead.

On the thirteenth day, the brig Argus, which had been sent to look for them, sighted the raft by accident. Fifteen of the original 147 were still alive. Five of those died within days of rescue. The final ten survivors gave depositions on their return to France.

The Cover-Up

The Bourbon government had every reason to suppress the story. Chaumareys was a Bourbon appointee. The decision to cut the towlines had been made by Bourbon-appointed officers. The whole episode was an indictment of the restored monarchy's policy of placing political loyalists rather than competent officers in command of military vessels.

Two survivors, Henri Savigny (the ship's surgeon) and Alexandre Corréard (an engineer), wrote a detailed published account of the disaster. The account appeared in November 1817, titled Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse. It was a sensation. The book was attacked by royalist journals, defended by liberal ones, and circulated rapidly through Parisian society. Both authors were dismissed from government service shortly after publication.

Géricault

Théodore Géricault was twenty-six in 1817 when he read the Savigny and Corréard book. He was the son of a wealthy Norman family, trained as a painter under Carle Vernet and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, and was already known for several large equestrian paintings he had shown at the 1812 and 1814 Salons. He had recently returned from a year in Italy, where he had studied Caravaggio's Roman religious paintings and the late Michelangelo Sistine ceiling.

Géricault was a liberal and was furious about the Medusa cover-up. He decided to paint the raft for the 1819 Salon, in a deliberately massive scale that would make the picture impossible to ignore.

The Method

The painting that resulted is 491 by 716 centimetres. It is the largest painting Géricault ever made and one of the largest paintings of the nineteenth century. The composition shows the moment of rescue: the survivors on the raft sighting the Argus on the horizon, the figures arranged in a rising pyramid from the dead at the front to the figure waving a cloth at the back.

Géricault prepared the picture obsessively. He shaved his head so that he would not be distracted by his own appearance and would have to stay in the studio. He had a carpenter build a scale model of the raft. He read every account of the disaster he could find. He visited the morgue at the Hôpital Beaujon to study the colour and decay of corpses. He bought severed limbs from the morgue and arranged them in his studio to study at length.

He interviewed Savigny and Corréard at length. Corréard appears in the final painting: he is the figure in the centre-left, standing with his arm outstretched, pointing toward the horizon where the Argus has been sighted. Géricault hired the surgeon Savigny as a technical consultant. The carpenter who built the raft model also built the studio model of the rescue.

What the Painting Shows

The Raft was hung at the 1819 Salon in October 1819. The reception was sharply divided. Liberal critics praised it as a political statement. Royalist critics attacked its size and its colouring. The painter Antoine-Jean Gros, an older neoclassicist whose own work had once held the avant-garde position Géricault now occupied, said the painting was "the corpses of the Bourbons painted by a former Bonapartist."

The picture did not sell at the Salon. Géricault had hoped it would be purchased by the government for the Louvre. It was not. He exhibited it privately in London in 1820, where it drew large paying audiences and made him roughly the equivalent of £20,000 in modern money over a six-month exhibition run.

The painting was eventually acquired by the Louvre in 1824, the year of Géricault's death, for a price that was lower than what he had been paid in private London ticket sales. It has hung there since.

The Short Career

Géricault produced about 300 paintings and several thousand drawings in his lifetime. He died in January 1824, aged thirty-two, from complications of a riding accident. The Raft was the only major political painting of his career. After it, he had moved to a smaller scale: a series of psychiatric patient portraits made at the Salpêtrière in 1821 to 1822 (ten paintings, of which five survive), several lithograph series, and the equestrian studies that had always been his side interest.

The early death has been a kind of biographical asset to his reputation. Géricault is the founding example of the doomed Romantic painter: huge ambition, formal innovation, political engagement, dead at thirty-two. The model carried through Delacroix (who modelled for one of the figures in The Raft), through Manet a generation later, through Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and into the modern myth of the painter who burns hot and brief.

What the Raft Did

The Raft of the Medusa was the first large-scale modern history painting that took its subject from contemporary news rather than from classical or biblical history. The convention of nineteenth-century history painting had been to ennoble the present by allegorising it: to paint a Napoleonic victory, but with the figures dressed in Roman costume. Géricault refused the convention. He painted a contemporary disaster as a contemporary disaster, with the survivors named, the captain identifiable, the political failure visible.

The painting changed what large-scale public painting could be. Within a generation, Delacroix would paint the 1830 Revolution (Liberty Leading the People, 1830) on a similar scale and with a similar refusal of allegorical distancing. Manet would paint the execution of Maximilian in 1867 on the same Raft-scaled canvas. The line of large modern history paintings of the next century has its origin in the wall of the 1819 Salon.

The Raft also stayed politically useful. It became a reference point in French left-wing politics through the nineteenth century, an image that liberal papers would invoke whenever a Bourbon (later, a Napoleonic, later, a Bonapartist) regime committed an avoidable disaster. The painting did the political work Géricault had built it to do. The Bourbon regime fell in 1830. Chaumareys, the captain who had grounded the Medusa, was court-martialled and given three years in prison: a sentence that Géricault's painting had helped make politically necessary.