Three days after Géricault was informed that he had won a gold medal at the Salon, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys was released from prison and retired to his family domain, the Château de Lachenaud in Limousin. Meanwhile Alexandre Corréard’s call for justice before the chambers had made no impact and, even though the left would continue to cite the catastrophe as evidence of ultra misrule, the political potency of the scandal of the Medusa seemed to be on the ebb.
Across the channel, however, the story was very much alive. Not only had the Times carried a version of Savigny’s leaked article of September 1816, but two years later a full translation of Savigny and Corréard’s book was published. Savigny’s name appeared first on this English edition even though it is a translation of the second French edition, which had come under Corréard’s control. The English publisher was the much respected Henry Colburn, who was currently publishing the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Madame de Staël and acting as an agent for the collection of English donations to the Medusa’s subscription fund. The Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal proved a highly popular book. The part played by the late Major Peddie, whose kindness to Corréard when he had been hospitalized in Senegal stood in such heartwarming contrast to the callous indifference of the French leaders, endeared the saga to the British.1
The English relished a scandal that revealed weaknesses in French administration and the lack of discipline and moral fiber in their navy. French ineptitude reflected advantageously on English competence, and the gulf between the two forces was further highlighted by the impeccable behavior following the shipwreck of the British frigate HMS Alceste in February 1817. Returning home from the Far East with Lord Amherst, the British ambassador to the emperor of China, on board, the frigate, negotiating the imperfectly charted Straits of Gaspar to the north of Java, “struck with a horrid crash on a reef of sunken rocks, and remained immovable!” In complete contrast to the lack of adequate measures taken by Captain Chaumareys, the English Captain Murray Maxwell, had sailed through these straits with “the utmost precaution.” He had posted men “looking out at the mastheads, yard-arms and bowsprit end.” The “officer of the watch, on whom the charge of the ship at such a time more particularly devolves,” along with all the other officers on board, were vigilantly up on deck. In contrast to the Medusa, the Alceste was fortunately only three and a half miles from the nearest island when she ran aground and a raft was constructed to transport stores and baggage. A barge took the ambassador ashore and then returned for members of the crew. During the ensuing days, while Lord Amherst made for nearby Java to summon help, food and water dwindled and the British were threatened by savage Malay pirates, who eventually set fire to the Alceste and harassed their camp on the overgrown island. The officers set an excellent example to those beneath them and under “all the depressing circumstances attending shipwreck; of hunger, thirst and fatigue; and menaced by a ruthless foe, it was glorious to see the British spirit staunch and unsubdued.” Everybody survived the shipwreck, being rescued by HMS Ternate, which had been sent from Java. Captain Maxwell was acquitted and praised by the subsequent court-martial as having “conducted himself in the most zealous and officer like manner.”
A book written from the notes kept by the ship’s surgeon, John McLeod, was published in the same year that Savigny and Corréard’s Narrative first appeared in English, and the conduct of the British officers appeared exemplary beside that of the likes of Reynaud, Schmaltz, and Chaumareys. So telling was the contrast between these eyewitness accounts that a volume, published in Dublin in 1822, brought together the story of the Alceste with a truncated version of the Medusa narrative. In some “Observations” accompanying these texts, the editor states that the tales were placed together “as they clearly point out the advantage to be derived from discipline, subordination and moral feeling, on the one hand; and hold forth, on the other, a lamentable picture of the vicious state to which men may be reduced, when uninfluenced by these.”2
With the hook of international rivalry, the sympathetic role played by the English, and all the horrific ingredients of the inhuman tale, it was not surprising that a Barnum-like figure named William Bullock would wish to bring Géricault’s picture over to London as a topical attraction.3 Apart from financial gain and the possibility that a triumph in London would eradicate the memory of a disappointing Salon showing, there was considerable interest for a French artist in coming to, and being shown in, London. Despite the enduring rivalry between England and France, a lively cultural exchange had been taking place during the restoration.4
One reason for these growing ties between the two nations was the anglophilia of Louis XVIII. He had been well treated in exile by the British, who believed that peace in Europe would be secured if the French monarchy could be restored. After the upheavals of the Hundred Days, Louis kept a precautionary nest egg in Coutts Bank in England and the French government turned to Barings of London, rather than to its own banks, for a loan to help pay off its final indemnity to the Allies. At the same time, to the more liberal-minded French, London seemed a natural alternative to Paris; while the ultras were enjoying their domination of the chambre introuvable in the early part of the second restoration, the liberal Benjamin Constant had fled to London, as had the duc d’Orléans.
To the French of the restoration, Britain—with its industrial and naval supremacy—seemed progressive and powerful. But there was another side, a dark and unstable aspect to the country to which Géricault and his Raft of the Medusa came in 1820. The end of the Napoleonic wars had plunged Britain into serious economic crisis exacerbated by bad harvests and wildly fluctuating food prices. Around four hundred thousand demobilized soldiers were unemployed, factories that had lost their military customers faced ruin, government finances strained under the huge debt incurred by the war, and an enormously unpopular monarchy all placed Britain in a vulnerable and volatile state. There was open revolt and the specter of revolution. What is more, it fell to the normally stable property owners, already protesting over excessive taxation, to pay the rates that financed poor relief. The government thus faced rebellion, not only from radicals and agitators who made their appeal to the working class but also from the wealthier members of society. Recent French history had provided a dangerous precedent, which prompted Lord Liverpool’s Tory government to oppose reform lest it lead to revolution. In 1811, George III was declared unfit to govern and his politically incompetent and petulant son George became the prince regent. By the time this extravagant and narcissistic man was crowned George IV in 1820 he was detested.
Géricault embarked for England on April 10, 1820. With life in Paris proving painful and disappointing, London offered a new horizon. Although Liverpool’s reactionary government appeared to have successfully repressed revolt with the massacre at Peterloo in August 1819, its extensive network of government spies, and its six Gagging Acts, there was still revolutionary ferment in the air, rendering London an intriguing destination for the increasingly politicized artist.5
William Bullock, who was to exhibit Géricault’s masterpiece, had been in France in September 1819 and may have seen The Raft of the Medusa at the Salon. The entrepreneur undertook to handle all the arrangements for the London exhibition, elected to pay all costs, and offered Géricault a third of the profits.6 The lack of state or private patronage for history painting in England meant that, unlike in France, there had been a tradition of commercial exhibitions in London during the previous half century. In contrast to the exceptional presentation of Sabine Women Enforcing the Peace mounted by its painter, Jacques-Louis David, as a commercial venture in Paris in 1800, London had seen many celebrated artists such as John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and James Ward present their own large-scale works in exhibitions to which they charged admission.7 Just prior to Géricault’s arrival in the capital, Benjamin Robert Haydon “engaged the great room upstairs at Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, for a year from March 1, 1820.” For £300, a sum that he did not possess when he signed the contract, Haydon secured the space in which to show his Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. As the exhibition overlapped with Bullock’s presentation of The Raft of the Medusa the entrepreneur was praised by the Literary Gazette for creating the opportunity to compare French and English works.8
Shortly after Géricault’s arrival in the English capital, he was joined by his friend Auguste Brunet and by the portraitist Jean-Baptiste Isabey, who crossed the channel to escape the unwanted attentions of the French police who suspected him of circulating seditious drawings. If one adds to this little nest of expatriate radicalism the fact that William Bullock, a member of several liberal scientific societies, was involved in antislavery activities, then Géricault’s English adventure takes on a political as well as a personal and financial dimension. Abolitionists often cited African artifacts to help refute slave traders’ arguments about the subhumanity of their cargo, and Bullock’s London Museum was a startling showcase for ethnic dexterity. Even the dates of the exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa may have been deliberately chosen to coincide with increased English concern over France’s clandestine continuation of the slave trade in Senegal.
Although Géricault was in London to see the Raft presented before a less hostile public, any excitement at the prospect of a more favorable reaction does not seem to have dislodged the depression that had settled over him six months earlier. Professional success and private happiness had eluded him at home, and on the streets of London, moving through the thick industrial air, he experienced a misery perhaps even more pronounced than that which he had known in Paris. The image of death haunted him and he wrote his will, an act that his traveling companion Nicolas Charlet took as a prologue to a suicide attempt. With such fears in mind, when Charlet returned to their hotel late one night and found that Géricault had not gone out that day, he feared the worst. He rushed to Géricault’s room, banged on the door, burst in, and found his friend stretched out on the bed, unconscious. He revived him and, deploying his often brutal humor, attempted to jolt him out of his depression.9
Savigny and Corréard’s translated Narrative created generous advance publicity for the London exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa. Interest had been further stimulated by the opening, on May 29, 1820, at London’s Royal Coburg Theatre, of William Moncrieff’s Shipwreck of the Medusa, or, the Fatal Raft! A Drama in Three Acts. It was a spectacle that boasted the most extravagant and newfangled scenic effects: “various Panoramic views of the Ocean & Red Deserts of Zaara” and a “View of the Raft sailing amidst Novel & Extensive Moving Scenery.” The play is remarkable for the fact that the Medusa suddenly found herself with a British botswain, Jack Gallant, whose primary function was to emphasize the honorable and fearless qualities of the British seaman. The introductory remarks to the printed text of the play strike that censorious note that the English so readily applied to the tragedy: “Owing to a very relaxed state of discipline, and an ignorance of the common principles of navigation, that would have disgraced a private merchant ship, this frigate was suffered to run aground …” Of the play itself, one can only hope that the language barrier would have protected Géricault from its chauvinistic froth.10
London was going Medusa mad. Publicity for Bullock’s exhibition of the painting began with announcements for the private view on the front pages of the Times and the Morning Chronicle on Friday, June 9, 1820.
The Private Exhibition of Monsieur JERRICAULT’S GREAT PICTURE (from the Louvre), 24 feet by 18, representing the surviving Crew of The Medusa French Frigate, after remaining thirteen days on a raft without provision, at the moment they discover the vessel that saves them, will take place at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, on Saturday, and will be opened to the public on Monday next.
From the press we know that “the Marquis of Stafford, the Bishops of Ely and Carlisle, and a number of the most eminent patrons of the Fine Arts together with several members of the Royal Academy” were present at the private view. As for Géricault, perhaps his experience was much like that of Benjamin Haydon, who only a few weeks earlier had, on the day of the private view of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, installed himself at Hatchett’s Coffee Room where he spent the time wondering whether anybody would turn up.
When the exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa opened to the public, visitors streamed into the outrageous building; through the doors sided by lotus columns and surrounded by hieroglyphs, down the passage to the main exhibition hall, through a “Pasaltic cavern” resembling the Giant’s Causeway, and through rooms that until the year before, when Bullock had auctioned off his own marvelous collection of objects and stuffed animals, had housed the most remarkable exhibits. Through these spaces of the newly established Bullock’s Egyptian Sale Room they moved, lured by the proprietor’s promise of a large and dramatic picture that portrayed the recent and ghastly shipwreck and that had created “universal interest … at the last exhibition of the Louvre.” Driven to spy on their recent enemy in its most abject hour, the public surged into the large Roman Gallery where The Raft of the Medusa was hanging, cunningly close to the ground, so that their approach would seem to continue on into the horrific scene. If Géricault had suffered from the first positioning of his work at the opening of the 1819 Salon, or from his compatriot’s wish either to forget the tragedy it portrayed or to use his painting as a pretext for political wrangling, then in London, in the hands of a consummate showman, he certainly fared better. As with Haydon’s exhibition, the “rush was great and went on increasing.”11
For the most part, the reviews were intelligent and sympathetic. In the Globe, on June 12, the reviewer noted that
Monsieur Jerricault … has selected for his first great historical effort a subject of the utmost difficulty, and with a singular absence of the national vanity ascribed to his countrymen, one which it would be well for the naval character of France to have blotted from her maritime annals. The story of the shipwreck of The Medusa … records a narrative of the most criminal ignorance, pusillanimity, and individual suffering which has no parallel in modern history.12
The reviewer in the Morning Post on June 13 commented, “This work far excels anything we have seen of the school to which it belongs …. There is more of nature, of the grand simplicity of art, and of true expression than is usual with the highest of modern French painters.” This was a view that was elaborated in the Times of June 22: “Though the painting bears marks of that cold pedantic school of which David may be considered the founder, yet the powerful talent of the artist has broken through the trammels of this system …. The expression is energetic, true, and full of pathos.”13 In contrast to the carping of many Parisian critics, two intelligent reviews appeared in the London Literary Gazette: Journal of Belles Lettres, noting, “The Morgue seems to have been studied as far as it could without exciting horror” and “the bold hand of the artist has laid bare the details of the horrid facts, with the severity of Michael Angelo and the gloom of Caravaggio … the whole of the colouring is so well suited to the subject.”14
The exhibition having opened with great success, Géricault returned to France. He arrived in Dieppe on June 19 and went on to Paris. Across Europe there were stirrings of liberal discontent. In Spain, there was a successful revolt against the Bourbons. In July there were insurrections in Naples and Sicily, followed in 1821 by stirrings of subversion in Portugal and Greece. There was liberal agitation in German universities but in France, as one English visitor remarked, “Since the assassination of the Duke de Berry, all has been distrust and suspicion.” Indeed, after that assassination on February 13, 1820, which forced the resignation of Decazes, blamed for his tolerance of dissent, the government shifted markedly to the right. Henceforth there would be no question of reconciliation, only of two opposed parties. Louis XVIII’s worst fears were realized as the country became bitterly divided. In March 1820, more laws enforcing press censorship and curtailing individual liberties were passed. In April there was a control imposed upon the publication and distribution of engravings.
In May and June, medical and law students led the liberal reaction against the repressive measures and, in early June, they clashed with royalists outside the chamber of deputies where a twenty-three-year-old law student named Nicholas Lallemand was killed. The young man became a liberal martyr and, after his funeral, student demonstrators incited the workers of the faubourg Saint-Antoine to riot, crying, “Long live the charter!” and “Down with the royalists!” A rebellious crowd formed and began to move toward the Tuileries. Louis XVIII, sensing the tension and the danger to his throne, had not, as had been his habit, removed his court to St. Cloud for the summer. The crowd swelled to cries of “Down with the king!” and “Long live Napoleon” until, to the relief of the government, the mob was dispersed by a downpour. Over the following weeks, tension mounted and there was, by late summer, a general anxiety that the king and the benign institutions of his reign might be overthrown. The fact that the bourgeoisie felt as threatened by such outbursts as the ultras consolidated the country’s move to the right; in the elections in early November 1820, the left captured only 80 out of 430 seats, whereas the ultras obtained 160, of which 75 had been held during the ill-famed chambre introuvable.
Against this deteriorating political situation, Alexandre Corréard was found guilty of publishing seditious material.15 He had already brushed with the law and had pamphlets confiscated, but this time he was fined and imprisoned. As the third edition of The Shipwreck of the Frigate, the Medusa was to be published by Corréard in July of the following year, embellished by eight engravings made by Géricault and others, it seems inevitable that during the artist’s six-month stay in Paris they would have met to discuss the project and Géricault would have become further involved in the struggles of active French liberals.
On December 30, 1820, Bullock’s exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa closed. It had been a sensational success, drawing up to fifty thousand visitors. Géricault’s share of the London takings was between 17,000 and 20,000 francs, three to four times as much as the sum that might be offered by the French establishment when purchasing canvases of this size and importance. Spurred on by success in London, where Bullock had exploited the similarities in size between Géricault’s painting and the tremendously popular contemporary entertainment, the panorama, the impresario took The Raft of the Medusa to Dublin, where the commercial success of the venture was ironically compromised by competition from an immense panorama shrewdly capitalizing on the current interest in the horrors of the raft. Shortly after Bullock’s exhibition opened at the Rotunda, on February 5, 1821, a notice appeared in a Dublin newsletter announcing that
Messrs. Marshall respectfully beg leave again to solicit the kind patronage of the Nobility, Gentry and the public of Dublin, and its vicinity, for their lately finished, entirely novel Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft. Also the ceremony of crossing the line. Each view accompanied by a full and appropriate band of music. The picture is painted on nearly 10,000 sq. feet of canvas, under the direction of one of the survivors, in a superior style of brilliancy and effect—the figures on the Raft and on the boat being the size of life.16
A month into the exhibition of Géricault’s painting, Bullock’s presentation was obviously struggling in the face of the loud, popular “peristrephic,” or revolving, panorama. He was forced to reduce his entrance fee from 1 shilling, 8 pence to a more competitive 10 pence, “In order that all ranks may have the opportunity of viewing this stupendous production of the pencil.”17 Although Bullock was now offering Géricault at the same price as the cheapest ticket sold by the Marshalls for their panorama at the Pavilion, by the end of March the Géricault exhibition was forced to close whereas the panorama continued to play in Dublin thrice daily to packed houses until June 9. Géricault’s oblique, 430-square-foot indictment of the leaders and organizers of the Senegal expedition, his grand metaphor for the fragility of the human condition, could not compete with an extravaganza that sensationally plunged the public visually and aurally into the event.18
Géricault had not been in London for the closure of his exhibition at the end of December 1820, but he returned to England shortly afterward for a stay of about a year. During the winter of 1821, the painter lodged near fashionable Hyde Park where he was able to ride.19 Although he was participating in the equestrian pleasures of upper-class London, Géricault’s continuing depression led him to seek out and explore the lower depths of the industrialized city. He observed those whose lives had been wrecked by the changing order, the castaways along the wharves and in the crippled byways of the city. Vestiges of classicism that in certain critics’ eyes had compromised the appalling horror of the Raft could have no place here; classicism was a style incapable of depicting the personal misery and suffering he encountered. Through his political awakening while working on the Medusa, Géricault’s subject matter had become man’s inhumanity to man, and here, on the streets of London, was an appalling parade of destitution and abuse. While the Medusa was foundering in Dublin, Géricault was hard at work. He collaborated with the lithographer Charles Hullmandel on a series of twelve images contrasting aspects of life in the capital; workhorses and thoroughbreds, industrious blacksmiths and farriers were treated along with uncompromising images of the urban poor.20
Although it has been observed that Géricault was working in the tradition of Hogarth, in his attitude to the destitute there is none of that artist’s overt didacticism. Géricault’s view is objective, though not unsympathetic. In the muted compassion of his lithographs, in their elucidation of the shameful state of affairs, Géricault emerges as the first great visual critic of the industrial revolution.
While devoting himself to an art that “was a novelty in London,” Géricault wrote to Dedreux-Dorcy on February 12, reporting that he had been “extremely sick.” He was also far from happy. The circumstances surrounding the otherwise flattering attentions shown to him by a married “woman of great fortune who was not in her first flush of youth” can only have acted as a painful echo of his complicated relations with his uncle and Alexandrine. This mysterious woman fell head over heels in love with Géricault, calling him the “God of painting,” but the affair, in a mocking reminder of his uncle’s early generosity, was made awkward by the “thousand kindnesses” her husband extended to the young man, even offering lodgings in his house so that Géricault could work. Otherwise, the painter admitted to his friend that “I don’t amuse myself at all, my life is that which I led in Paris, working a lot in my room and then prowling the streets to relax myself where there is always such movement and variety that I’m sure that you wouldn’t tire of it.”
Although at the end of September Géricault wrote that his health was better, during this time in London he suffered an attack of sciatica, provoked by a boat trip on the Thames. When the architect Charles Cockerell, whom Géricault had met in Rome, went with the artist to view some paintings on December 1, he noted in his diary that Géricault looked “ill and consumptive”; bidding good-bye to him eleven days later, Cockerell summarized the painter’s questionable style of life: “lying torpid days and weeks, then rising to violent exertions. Riding, tearing, driving, exposing himself to heat, cold, violence of all sorts.” Cockerell concluded that he feared the artist was “in a bad way.” Indeed, during his time in London, Géricault began to suffer from the first phases of what eventually developed into tuberculosis of the spine.21
On December 13, the artist traveled to Dover and embarked for France on the following day. He wrote of the crossing in a letter to a fellow French painter who had been living near him on the Edgware Road, perhaps gently mocking the current enthusiasm for nautical disaster.
I could easily give you a description of a marvelous storm, paint a picture of sails ripped, the masts swept by the furious waves, the captain up against it, abandoning the rudder and the sailors, petrified, fallen on their knees to invoke St. Veronica. I would rather first put you at peace and tell you simply that there was no real disorder except in our stomachs, that all the basins were used; we arrived at Calais well purged and very pale.
Géricault found absolutely nothing changed in France “except the ministers, but—they don’t last long.”22
Indeed, on December 14, the very day Géricault crossed the channel to return home, a new ultra ministry came to power. Its use of the police would differ little from the previous, more moderate administration, but this new right-wing government proved more determined in its application of repressive measures. Louis XVIII was growing weaker and this new government had the support of the ultra duc d’Artois, who was moving, daily, closer to the throne.
Two things, however, had changed in France while Géricault was away. First, the death of Napoleon on May 5, 1821, on the island of Saint Helena, had brought the various factions opposing the monarchy closer together; there were no longer Bonapartists and liberals and Orléanists but merely an antimonarchical left, united in opposition. Second, the English abolitionist William Wilberforce had begun to make efforts to enlist French liberals in his cause.
Work on The Raft of the Medusa, his association with Alexandre Corréard, and some disturbing news emerging from the colony in Senegal swept Géricault up into an issue that would preoccupy him for the rest of his short life. The residue of the Medusa fiasco was leading to the exposure of one of France’s greatest scandals.