In 1819 he completed his greatest picture, that which most people alone call to mind—not quite fairly—when his name is mentioned—“The Raft of the Medusa.” What a tragedy is there represented! For twelve days the unfortunate wretches have been on the deep, starving, in utter despair and ready to lift their hands against each other. They were a hundred and fifty, now they are but fifteen. One old man holds upon his knees the corpse of his son; another tears his hair out, left alone in life after seeing all his dear ones perish. In the foreground lie dead bodies which the waves have not yet swept away. But far away in the distance a sail appears. One points it out to another: yes, it is a sail! A mariner and a negro mount upon an empty barrel and wave their handkerchiefs in the air. Will they be seen? The anxiety is terrible. And ever higher and higher the grey waves roll on.

Seemann, Leipzig.
GÉRICAULT.THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA.
GÉRICAULT.THE START.

How must such a scene have impressed a generation which for long years had seen nothing in the Salon but dry mythology and painted statues! Géricault was the first to free himself from the tyranny of the plaster-of-Paris bust, and once again to put passion and truth to nature in the place of cold marble. Just as he commissioned the ship’s carpenter who had constructed the raft and was one of the saved to make him a model of it, so also he moved into a studio close to the hospital, for the purpose of studying the sick and dying, of sketching dead bodies and single limbs. It must be admitted that one would wish for a yet firmer grasp of the subject. In form, Géricault still belongs to the school of David. A good deal of Classicism shows itself in the fact that he thought it necessary to depict the majority of the figures naked, in order to avoid “unpictorial” costumes. There is still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death; but what man can free himself at one stroke from the influence of his time and environment? Even in the colouring there lingers some touch of the Classical school. It offends no one, a fact to be insisted on in comparing him with the Nazarenes; but as yet it plays no part in expressing the meaning of the picture. From the distance, indeed, whence the rescuing ship is drawing near, a bright light shines forth upon a scene otherwise depicted in dull brown. Save for this, the intention of the picture is not expressed by means of colour, and it even shows some retrogression as compared with Géricault’s earlier works. He had begun with Rubens, yet these studies in colouring did not last. In the “Wounded Cuirassier” of 1814 dark tones took the place of the former cheerfulness, and so in the “Raft of the Medusa” he imagined the tragedy could be represented only in sombre hues. He spread over the whole scene a monotonous unpleasant brown shade, and in his endeavour to lay all weight upon human emotion he went so far as almost to suppress the sea, which nevertheless played the chief part in the drama, and whose deep blue would have afforded a splendid contrast. Discoveries are not to be made all at once, but only when their hour is come.

Seemann, Leipzig.
EUGÈNE DELACROIX.

The next step in French art was to be that of reinstating the significance of colour in the full rights conquered for it by Titian, so that it should no longer be merely a tasteful tinting of the figures, but should become truly that which gives its temper to the picture. It was not reserved for Géricault to effect this. A trip to London, which he made in 1820, in company with his friend Charlet, was the last event of his life. There the sportsman awoke in him once more, and he painted the “Race for the Derby at Epsom.” Soon after his return he was thrown from his horse while riding, but lingered on for two years longer, suffering from a spinal complaint. With a few more years in which to develop he should have been one of the great masters of France, but he died when scarcely in his thirty-second year.

Yet he lived long enough to observe, in the Salon of 1822, the début of one of his comrades from Guérin’s studio. A greater than himself, to whom with dying voice he had given a few words of advice, arose as the intellectual heir of the young painter so prematurely carried off, and carried to its issue the struggle which he had begun. It was on 26th April 1799, at midday, that the first genuine painter’s eye of the century saw the light, at Charenton Saint-Maurice. Géricault had made a beginning, but it was the impetuous, powerful genius of Eugène Delacroix which entered in and completed his work. What Gros had dimly perceived, but had not dared to express, what Géricault had barely had time with a courageous hand to point out, a hand too soon stiffened in death—the modern poetry of colour, of fever, and of quivering emotion—it was reserved for Delacroix to write.

“That child will grow up to be a famous man; his life will be extremely laborious, but also extremely agitated, and always exposed to opposition.” Thus had a madman prophesied of the boy one day when he and his nurse were taking a walk near the lunatic asylum at Charenton. And he was right.

L’Art.
DELACROIX.DANTE’S BARK.