The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault

Hope at the top, death at the bottom

The raft is built as a pyramid of bodies. At the lower left an old man sits holding a dead youth across his lap and stares away from everything; corpses slide off the planks into the sea at the front. Above them the living surge towards the right, arms reaching, until a man standing on a barrel, held up by the others, waves a cloth at a ship so small on the horizon it is barely there. Behind them the makeshift sail strains on its mast, and a great wave rises on the left.

A scandal, researched

The French frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of West Africa in July 1816. Some 150 people were set adrift on a raft; thirteen days later, fifteen were still alive when the brig Argus found them, and the story of murder and cannibalism became a national scandal. Géricault interviewed survivors, had a model of the raft built, and studied the dying and the dead in hospital. The young Delacroix sat for one of the figures. The canvas was shown at the Salon of 1819.

Where it hangs

The Louvre bought it in 1824, the year of Géricault’s death, and it hangs there still, in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. It is enormous: 491 by 716 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 5,872-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 39 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Musée du Louvre, Paris · Wikidata Q212616 · Wikimedia Commons