Theodore Gericault

Theodore Gericault, Painting Black Bodies

This book examines Théodore Géricault’s images of black men, women and children who suffered slavery’s trans-Atlantic passage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including his 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa. The book focuses on Géricault’s depiction of black people, his approach towards slavery, and the voices that advanced or denigrated them. By turning to documents, essays and critiques, both before and after Waterloo (1815), and, most importantly, Géricault’s own oeuvre, this study explores the fetters of slavery that Gericault challenged—alongside a growing number of abolitionists—overtly or covertly. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, race and ethnic studies and students of modernism.

Theodore Gericault (1791-1824)

Theodore Gericault

Jean-Louis Andr� Th�odore G�ricault was an influential French painter and lithographer, known for "The Raft of the Medusa" and other paintings. Although he died young, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic Movement. His stormy career lasted little more than a decade and in that time he displayed a meteoric and many-sided genius. His love of thrilling action, his sense of swirling movement, his energetic conduct of paint, and his taste for the horrid were all to become features of Romanticism. G�ricault was, at the same time avant-garde in his realism: he made studies from corpses and severed limbs for The Raft of the Medusa and painted an extraordinary series of portraits of mental patients in the clinic of his friend Dr Georget. His work had enormous influence, most notably on Delacroix.