Image · Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault · 1818–1819
About this masterpiece
Géricault’s monumental canvas depicts the harrowing aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse off the coast of Senegal in 1816. Set adrift on a hastily built raft, 147 survivors descended into hunger, mutiny and cannibalism; only fifteen lived. The painting captures the moment they spot a rescuing ship on the horizon, their pyramidal mass of bodies straining toward hope.
Historical significance
A sensation at the 1819 Salon, the work fused Romantic emotional intensity with savage political critique — the disaster had been blamed on an incompetent royalist captain. Géricault visited morgues and hospitals to study dying flesh, lending the painting a brutal realism that helped inaugurate the Romantic movement in France.
