1812 -1824 · Portrait, horse and Raft of the Medusa

The Louvre brings together the main faces of Géricault: human portrait, English race, anatomical study and monumental shipwreck show a brief but decisive work.

Théodore Géricault enters the history of romanticism through a career interrupted at thirty-two. The Louvre retains an essential ensemble to follow its evolution. The officers and cuirassiers of the beginnings transformed the military portrait into an image of unstable energy. The horse races, nourished by his stay in English, analyze speed, suspension and bodies in groups. The study of hand and forearm recalls that this power is based on constant anatomical observation. The horse races, nourished by his stay in England, analyze speed, suspension and bodies in groups. The Study of the Hand and Forearm recalls that this power is based on constant anatomical observation. The Raft of the Medusa, exhibited in 1819, makes a contemporary political shipwreck a painting of monumental history: survivors, deaths, waves and sails converge on an almost invisible ship. Portrait man known as the Vendéen, monomaniac, rifleman and dead animal further expand the museum register. The selection proposed here thus confronts individual, movement, fragment and catastrophe, four paths by which Géricault breaks with the stable heroic ideal. The selection "Théodore Géricault at the Louvre Museum" notably compares Portrait of a Man, known as the Vendéen, and Horse Race, traditionally known as The Derby of 1821 in Epsom. His reading favors the material.

At the Louvre, Géricault goes from the horse's muscle to the shipwrecked man's arm: anatomy becomes the common language of movement, hope and death.