Reference Painter: II – Gericault

Theodore Gericault
(1791 – 1824)

A number of painters in the Romantic period, and some before it, believed imagery should present situations, states of suffering, and outrage in forms that were extreme and compelling in themselves. These images, they thought, would stimulate the sympathy and satisfaction that were regarded as salutary and sublime - indeed they envisaged a situation in which agony as such would create a demand for experience that would in other contexts be intolerable. Among these uncommon spirits the painter Géricault was quite exceptional. He generated images of physical grandeur, brushing light into dark with an impulsive bluntness, which was a direct manifestation of natural force. He portrayed, for example, triumphant heroism, valiant defeat, splendid savagery, and animal magnificence, all of them with irresistible nobility and pathos.