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The Raft of the Medusa
Le Radeau de la Méduse
Survivors of a shipwreck wave at a ship on the horizon: a scandal of 1816, painted life-size.
In July 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of West Africa. Its officers took the lifeboats and left some 150 people on a makeshift raft; after thirteen days only fifteen were still alive when the brig Argus found them.
Géricault, 27 years old, interviewed survivors, had a model of the raft built and studied the dying in hospitals and the dead in the morgue. He painted the moment the survivors spot the Argus, a speck on the horizon, and a man waves a cloth at it. Shown at the Salon of 1819, it read as an attack on the government that had given the ship to an incompetent captain. Stand before it in 3D ›
