As the winter of 1819 progressed, Géricault was hard at work, intent on finishing his painting for the Salon, which would open in August of that year. He had won a gold medal with his debut in 1812, exhibited three works in 1814, but had missed the event in 1817 because he had been in Italy. It was high time to make his mark. The Salon was supremely important to painters; with an embryonic art market and with nonofficial or privately mounted exhibitions a rarity, it was their only established forum. Organized by the administrators of the royal museums, during the restoration the event had grown in size.
The 1819 Salon would be not only larger than its predecessors, it would be coupled with an Industrial Fair, proclaiming that France was emerging from the ravages of instability and beginning to embrace the modern age. The return of a good deal of Napoleonic plunder to its rightful owners had left gaping spaces in the Louvre’s collection, now waiting to be filled with the best in modern French painting. The artists attracting the most official interest were those history painters who turned their backs on the large battle scenes that had been so popular during the empire in order to flatter the restored monarchy with illustrations from the lives of French kings.1
Ignoring this trend and having discarded other ideas, Géricault had finally settled on the most poignant moment in Corréard and Savigny’s scandalous narrative, a moment of hope that would evaporate, leaving the enfeebled survivors in despair. Apart from their inherent technical difficulties, discarded episodes such as acts of mutiny or of cannibalism might have jeopardized the polemic of the painting by provoking questions about the culpability of his new friends Alexandre Corréard and Henri Savigny. What had been the two survivors’ motives in giving an exhaustive account that repeatedly apportioned blame while praising and flattering its two authors? Had they, in order to survive, and in refusing the role of victim been guilty of actions that were as cowardly or egotistical as the leaders whom they accused?2 In choosing to paint the first sighting of the Argus, when the brig remained too distant to notice the raft, Géricault subtly reminded spectators of the culpability of the leaders of the expedition. By freezing that moment, the painter presented his public with a scene of great suspense. The unsaved were fixed at a point before the happy ending, before, at the eleventh hour, rescue miraculously arrived.
On a political level, the image is a stern indictment. Géricault’s decision to include, on the extreme right-hand side of his canvas, the blue, white, and red of a uniform trailing off the raft into the water, acts with its echo of the revolutionary tricolor like a requiem for republican French values. On another level, if the almost imperceptible Argus were to be read as a religious or spiritual metaphor, it suggests that salvation may simply not be forthcoming. The artist’s search for a composition capable of conveying far-reaching meanings precluded any off-putting scene of Gothic horror. Géricault sought a potent image, not realism in all its awful excess.
Montfort, Géricault’s young assistant, recalled the painter’s complete need of quiet as he worked: “When I made a bit of noise with my chair, in the midst of the absolute silence in the studio, … Géricault, who was standing on a table in order to paint the top of his canvas, reproached me gently with a knowing smile, which let me know that the noise of a mouse was enough to stop him from painting.” Géricault’s pupil Jamar was, to that end, obliged to wear slippers. Concentration was intense and the hours were long; the artist would start early, so as to benefit from the morning light, and work on, uninterrupted, through the day until nightfall.3 Even when he left the studio that he had littered with death, Géricault found himself attracted to the pallor of suffering. One day in Sèvres he encountered his friend Théodore Lebrun, who had succumbed to jaundice. Lebrun recalled that
I had much trouble finding a lodging; my cadaverous face frightened all the inn-keepers; none of them wanted me to die at their place … one afternoon, I saw Géricault approaching with one of his friends … suddenly he recognized me and seized me in his arms: “Ah, my friend, you are really beautiful.” I frightened myself, children ran away, taking me for dead—but I was beautiful to the painter who was looking everywhere for the color of death. He pressed me to visit him and to pose for the Medusa.4
Among the people who came to model for Géricault was the young painter Eugène Delacroix, who posed for the man facedown in the center foreground of the picture. Delacroix remembered that The Raft of the Medusa had a terrifying effect in its unfinished state and recalled that the “impression it gave me was so strong that, as I left the studio, I broke into a run, and kept running like a fool all the way back … to the far end of the faubourg Saint-Germain.”5 Generally, Géricault used professionals such as the popular model Joseph, who sat for the figure of Jean-Charles, the black man signaling. He also made numerous studies of survivors such as the ship’s carpenter, Lauillette, and Savigny and Corréard.6 They came to the studio to provide the artist with eyewitness accounts and they came to pose. Corréard, as a recognizable figure, first appears in the sketches for the scene of false hope that Géricault finally selected for his painting.
Since September 1818, Corréard had been running a bookshop in the Palais Royal that had become a meeting place for political activists. The publication of The Shipwreck had made him a celebrity, and unlike the retiring Savigny, who wished to put his difficult past behind him, Corréard capitalized on his success and went so far as to call his bookshop At the Victim of the Shipwreck of the Medusa. Corréard was trading on his misfortune as well as making a political point, alerting the authorities of his desire to publish and spread what they considered to be sedition.
Corréard exerted a considerable influence on the painter. Certainly, they became friends and even collaborators when Géricault produced engravings for the third edition of The Shipwreck, which, with additions such as an account of Corréard’s trial, a list of the “Subscribers to the Medusa Shipwreck Fund,” and a seven-page, indifferent ode, fell somewhere between a self-promoting gripe and a deluxe collector’s edition. Although it was unlikely that Corréard could influence Géricault radically, he had by now a reputation to maintain. Elements of his narrative had already been contested by other survivors of the raft and Corréard could not afford to have his authority doubted. His credentials as an agitator needed to remain secure. If the scandal was, once again, to be brought to the public’s attention, and particularly in such a prominent place as the Salon, would it not be in Corréard’s interest that certain elements be sanitized so as to avoid embarrassing speculation about those actions that enabled him and Savigny to survive? Would it not be in his best interest that Géricault’s painting stress the culpability of the leaders rather than the horrors of the raft? Corréard’s cause would be served by a painting that made a grandly political statement, rather than one that presented a vision of bloody and controversial massacre or cannibalism.
In the finished Raft of the Medusa, Géricault placed Corréard in pride of place, positioning him almost centrally, on the line of the canvas’s all-powerful golden section, with his side-lit face carrying the charged expression of one who has something to broadcast. He is looking at the swathed head of Savigny, his coauthor, as if saying, “There you have it. What we see in the distance is not a rescue vessel, it’s nothing but a part of the same state machinery that is responsible for our present plight.” His gesture is not one of exuberance at having glimpsed hope, but alarmist and accusatory. His outstretched arm against the dawn light takes the eye along the line from the dead son outstretched in his father’s arms to the controversially placed black signaler at the apex of all their hope. Although this signaler is given a position of importance, Corréard pulls the eye as the key figure in the composition. The painting does not present Corréard as victim, but Corréard as messenger, Corréard the polemicist, the savior who would take up arms against a sea of troubles.
On April 21, 1819, still smarting from the lack of sympathy shown him and his fellow sufferers, Corréard presented a report to the chambers of the peers and deputies, attacking the inexperienced and unworthy men who to his mind had caused the tragedy of the Medusa. Corréard sought justice on behalf of the victims of the shipwreck who, nearly three years after the tragedy, were still struggling against slander, rejection, exhaustion, and pain. Corréard pleaded for even the smallest display of compassion from the authorities. Insisting on nothing for himself, and in the name of national honor, he beseeched the members of the chambers, those “moral guardians” of France, to observe the rights set out in the charter and punish the guilty parties to the fullest.
He attacked the ex—minister of the navy, vicomte DuBouchage, whose pride had prevented him from adequately pursuing and punishing his appointees. Corréard accused DuBouchage of concealing crime and encouraging it by impunity, having tried Chaumareys only for the loss of his ship. He further accused DuBouchage of having imperiled the lives of Frenchmen and other ships of his majesty by placing them under the command of like-minded incompetents.
Corréard urged the members of the chambers to consider whether Captain Chaumareys had been adequately tried for the two major crimes he had committed, the abandoning of his ship and the abandoning of the raft. Often citing the letter of the law and before proceeding to the capital crimes, Corréard lists the various misdemeanors of the Captain and the other officers: Chaumareys for allowing the convoy to break up; Chaumareys and the officer of the watch for abandoning a fifteen-year-old ship’s apprentice who had fallen overboard on June 23, 1816; the officer commanding the boat that put in to shore at Santa Cruz on June 29 who refused to rescue six French prisoners; Chaumareys for having failed to recognize Cap Blanc; Chaumareys for having lost the Medusa. He then accused Chaumareys for not being the last to leave his ship but rather disembarking when there were still sixty-four men on board, which, according to Article 35 of the law of August 22, 1790, carried the death penalty. All the Medusas officers are accused of having abandoned the “152” people on board the raft; this “in the name of all the laws of humanity and Articles 36 and 37 under Heading 2 of the aforementioned law,” which clearly stated that “All officers entrusted with commanding a convoy found guilty of having voluntarily abandoned it will be condemned to death.” Corréard also chided Chaumareys for not having sent the Argus, the Loire, and the Echo to search for the raft as soon as he had reached Saint-Louis.
Corréard attacked Colonel Schmaltz for various crimes and misdemeanors: for having waited two days before liaising with the English governor over a possible search-and-rescue operation; for not accepting Colonel Brereton’s offer of using all the ships at his disposal; for delaying the departure of the Argus; and for not punishing those who misappropriated government and personal property recovered from the Medusa two months after its wreck. He declared Schmaltz unworthy of representing the French government and stated that he should be indicted under clause No. 12 of Article 475 of the penal code, which condemns those who refuse or neglect to help the victims of a shipwreck or other accident. Most important, perhaps, Corréard openly questioned Schmaltz’s behavior in relation to one of the most far-reaching and unpleasant aspects of the whole recolonization of Senegal, the abominable trade in human beings that was becoming a burning issue for liberals in France, and which would unite Corréard and Géricault. Without swearing that such rumors were true, Corréard urged the chamber to look into the possibility that Schmaltz was not only openly favoring but active in the slave trade.7
Corréard was still physically suffering from his ordeal, with painful scars covering his body, and he was not prepared to accept soft justice; Chaumareys had less than a year left in jail and Schmaltz was, by all accounts, profiting from the slave trade. Corréard was adamant that subsequent editions of The Shipwreck contain a printed record of the catalog of crimes that he had aired before the government and, henceforth, his attack would take on a larger target than mere reparation for past ills; it would begin to address this illegal trade in human flesh.
To place a black man in such a dominant position in his finished Medusa composition suggests that Géricault sympathized with Corréard’s political struggle and was listening to the debates in the liberal circle around him. To place a figure who, because of his color, was generally considered to be subhuman at the summit of whatever hope The Raft of the Medusa may be said to express was daringly, dangerously, avant-garde.
Recent research shows that the three black figures in the finished painting were introduced at a late stage in the composition.8 Their placing tells its own story. The one lying facedown, dead, over the haunch of the figure clammering from the deck speaks of past despair. The second, placed significantly between Savigny and the political agitator Corréard, looks up hopefully to the third, who is signaling optimistically. A counterpoint to the story of voyagers abandoned by their leaders, these three present the larger drama of a people passing from despair and victimization to hope for a brighter future. The artist had become not only a witness to the malfunctioning French administration, but also an advocate for a fundamental shift in human rights.
While working on the painting, Géricault made short excursions out of Paris. In late March 1819, he made a trip to Le Havre to study the effects of clouds over water. He also went with Horace Vernet and a retired officer on a short trip to visit English artists. The channel crossing afforded Géricault further opportunity to study the sea and the clouds and allowed him to experience the sensation of being on water.9 Otherwise, the painter was hard at work in his studio on The Raft of the Medusa, which, as a result of his enforced isolation, he finished in the relatively short period of eight months. The painting was emerging darkly monochromatic. There was a lot of black, a color that, Géricault observed, “suits pain.”10
The large surface of the canvas may have been dark, but it revealed something surprising, even revolutionary. Traditionally, seascapes painted in Holland, France, and England presented distant scenes of disaster on small canvases in which any human drama was relegated to tiny, almost meaningless detail. In the powerful northern romantic work of Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner, human incident was dramatically subordinated to the force and grandeur of nature, but in Géricault’s large painting, however much we feel the presence of threatening elements, the work focuses on the survivors on the raft.
Géricault’s major paintings bring the spectator right up to the action, revealing the artist’s early and persistent understanding of the power of the close-up. In The Raft, such a procedure insists on the terrifying distance between the seemingly futile agitation of the survivors and the almost imperceptible fleck of the Argus on the horizon. This symbolically asserts the gulf between the peril of the abandoned and the distant attitude of the leaders of the expedition. The Argus is seen from either the stern or the bow but it is impossible to say which, so those on the raft and the spectator have no way of knowing whether the ship is approaching or is about to disappear from sight. Furthermore, by making the ship a mere smudge, Géricault suggests that it may even be a delusion, a phantom of these severely tested men’s delirious minds.
When, in July 1819, Géricault thought that he had finished his canvas, six men came to transport it to the foyer of the Théâtre Italien in the Place Boieldieu, where paintings were being assembled for the Salon. Seeing the canvas with a refreshed critical vision once it had been removed from the familiar surroundings of his studio, Géricault realized that the bottom right-hand corner was disturbingly empty. Increased tension could be given to the painting by filling the space with a dead figure being dragged from the raft into the sea. Géricault decided to reintroduce a figure that had appeared in a study for what may have been a scene of cannibalism.11 He further modified his work by including another figure, lying dead on his back, at the extreme left.12 These additions to a raft already too populous to match the numbers given by the official reports as well as by Corréard and Savigny demonstrate how Géricault discarded journalistic verisimilitude. He placed his figures and structured his groupings in order to sweep from despair in the foreground to the false hope of the gesticulating black man on the barrel. Bolstered by his researches, which had secured emotional depth and integrity, the painter dared to depart from the literal truth in his expression of a more profound meaning.
When Corréard faced the finished picture, it must have made a tremendous impact on his sense of himself. He must have felt redeemed, honored, rewarded. Here he was, in the middle of this vast painting, sending a wake-up call to France.
On September 18, 1816, a worried vicomte DuBouchage had written to Louis XVIII on the subject of the wreck of the Medusa: “I bemoan the fact that the journalists revel in disclosing details of deplorable scenes, the picture of which must never be brought before the eyes of the public.”13 When the generally lackluster 1819 Salon opened on the Feast of Saint Louis, August 25, nearly a year to the day after the birth of Géricault’s son, there could be seen, hanging among the sixteen hundred items on show, The Scene of the Shipwreck, the compromise title devised by the Salon authorities in an attempt to deflect public attention from the true subject of Géricault’s vast canvas. Ironically, in an exhibition intended as a political shopwindow for the recently restored monarchy, one of the most talked about paintings was this very work, which, despite its neutralizing new title, obviously called into question the competency of the Bourbon administration.
The 1819 Salon saw the first stirrings of the debate between the old, neoclassical school, which had dominated French art for the previous thirty years, and the new romantic artists who had grown up during that period of turmoil. The quarrel would erupt dramatically in 1824 when the two schools would be split into the classical “Homerians” and the younger romantic “Shakespearians.” It was an argument involving questions of detachment versus immediacy, formality versus spontaneity, and it led eventually to a loss of confidence in Salon juries and the revolt against the academy and official art that would stimulate painting in nineteenth-century France. Géricault’s gloomy shipwreck, painted on an unacceptably large canvas for its genre, provoked an early attack on the new school of painting, which appeared to reject good taste for what was ugly.14
Artistic affront to the establishment was a dangerous tactic and, although Géricault’s private income allowed him to invest the time needed to produce a vast canvas, he could not ensure that the result would be accepted for exhibition; these Bourbons may have been more tolerant than their predecessors, but they faced a disgruntled populace. Certainly, with its controversial subject matter, no revolutionary or Napoleonic government would have admitted such a subversive painting as The Scene of the Shipwreck. In order to justify his selection and sounding a decidedly pro-romantic note, the comte de Forbin, the courageous and perceptive director of museums and organizer of the Salon, wrote to the comte de Pradel, the director-general of the royal household, that the “arts are the enemy of restraint.”15
Hanging in the company of the large work commissioned by the monarchy, the Ministry of the Interior, and the duc d’Orléans and placed compromisingly high on the wall of the Salon Carré, above the doorway to the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, was No. 510, Théodore Géricault’s Scene of the Shipwreck. From the opening of the Salon, reaction to the work seemed to be largely unfavorable. Géricault swiftly realized that this had much to do with its positioning. With the aid of his friend Dedreux-Dorcy, the painter managed to have his enormous canvas rehung so that its baseline was much nearer the floor. At this level, it took the spectator into what seemed like an extension of real space. Viewers were drawn into the upward thrust of the raft, an illusion that pulled them right on board. Not only was a moment of false hope frozen, the viewer had been made part of it.16 Hanging at this height, the impact of the scale of the figures was considerable and lent both drama and dignity to the suffering portrayed.
Louis XVIII kept up the custom, initiated by Napoleon, of the head of state visiting the Salon. On August 28, he made his two-hour visit in a wheelchair and, accompanied by several people including Elie Decazes, now the minister of the interior, Louis XVIII met Géricault. The king spent considerable time studying The Scene of a Shipwreck and, in a celebrated witticism, demonstrated the scope and agility of his political acumen. The king’s remark to Géricault begins, as the French writer Jean Sagne has pointed out, with what seems like an accusation: “Sir, you have made a shipwreck …,” displacing the guilt that Géricault, Corréard, and Savigny had heaped on the shoulders of the administration onto those of the painter. Expecting the sentence to keep up its accusatory tone, we are suddenly disarmed by the wit of its conclusion: “which is not one for you.” As Sagne suggests, complimenting a work that dared to challenge the regime was a powerful demonstration of regal magnanimity. Perhaps, studying the painting in the company of his favorite Decazes, the king remembered how the catastrophe had, in their concerted effort to neutralize the ultra threat, played right into their hands.17
Once more the wreck of the Medusa was the talk of the town. The ultra-royalist Quotidienne recorded that Géricault’s painting created a “huge uproar” at the Salon. Surprisingly, ex—minister of the navy DuBouchage became enraged with the organizer, Forbin, not for accepting The Scene of the Shipwreck for Salon presentation, but rather for including the portrait by Jacques-Marie Legros of his nemesis Alexandre Corréard, an exhibit that indeed confirms that Corréard had become something of a celebrity.18
Géricault, who until the late summer and early autumn of 1819 had been a relatively unknown artist, suddenly became “the painter of the Medusa”19 Not only was the public’s interest in the subject matter lively, the painting itself also provoked a great degree of critical controversy. Its somber, monochromatic effect was repeatedly reproved. La Quotidienne, in the first of its six articles covering the Salon, actually called the work by its real name, The Raft of the Medusa, and lamented the artist’s use of monochrome. On the other hand, the critic in Le moniteur universel noted that “the melange of red and gray tones produces a sinister effect which is in perfect accord with the spirit of the scene.”20 The critic of the Gazette de France, calling it a “monstrous painting,” suggested that Géricault had sacrificed all the rules in order to catch man in the midst of a calamity that forced him to lose his dignity; there was “nothing touching, nothing honourable.”21 The critic of l’Indépendant, while admiring Géricault’s draftsmanship, found nothing of Corréard and Savigny in the work, which he would have thought to be the intention of the painter.22 Meanwhile, aesthetes considered the “majesty of the brushwork” belittled by the choice of subject.23
Géricault was upset by the generally unfavorable reaction to his masterpiece and irritated by the inanity of certain critics. Having painted a political work, he now became a victim of political and journalistic wrangling. He vented his exasperation in a letter.
This year, our journalists have reached the heights of stupidity. Each painting is primarily judged according to the spirit in which it has been composed. Thus you hear a liberal article praise a patriotic touch in a work. … The same painting judged by an ultra will then be nothing other than a revolutionary composition governed by a general tint of sedition. The faces portrayed will all have an expression of hatred for the paternalistic government. Finally, I was accused by a certain Drapeau blanc to have slandered, by an expression on a face, the entire Ministry of the Navy. The unfortunate people who write such stupidities obviously haven’t starved for 14 days, because they would then know that neither poetry nor painting are capable of rendering with sufficient horror all the sufferings experienced by the people on the raft.24
It is obvious that as the Medusa was a cause célèbre, critics would be likely to divide along party lines. Given the subject matter, liberals took the pretext of the painting to reconsider the scandal of the shipwreck. To many of them, the refined neutrality of the classicized figures and the disinfected conditions on the raft appeared as a wasted opportunity. In the Courrier de Paris a critic even asked, “Are they Greeks or Romans?” The question is apposite; to deny the brutality of the facts by using a lingering neoclassicism in the treatment of the figures was to make a costume drama of a contemporary event and compromise the political message implied by the clash of the classes and races who had been condemned to the raft. Yet to make a great and important painting for the Salon, the language of Michelangelo was still considered necessary. The overall effect of the canvas is darkly romantic, yet the figures retain a muscular monumentality that belies its story.25
Exhausted by pressures in his personal life and by his punishing work on The Raft of the Medusa, as well as being overwhelmingly discouraged by its reception at the Salon, Géricault caved in to depression and retreated to the country. On September 11, he went to Machault and Féricy, near Fontainebleau, with the liberal sociologist Auguste Brunet. Despite the sympathetic company and the late summer splendors of the countryside, within two weeks Géricault retreated to his bed. He had became irritable and appeared to be suffering from persecution mania. By mid-October, he was taken back to Paris to undergo treatment.
It was decided that there should be no prize awarded for history painting in the 1819 Salon. Géricault’s masterpiece, along with works by thirty-two other artists, won a gold medal, an award that was eventually bequeathed to Alexandrine’s second child, Géricault’s godson, Paul. Meanwhile the canvas, having picked up an award but no buyer, was rolled up and stored in the obscurity of a fellow artist’s studio.26