Copy after Théodore Géricault
The story
Théodore Géricault left behind relatively few finished paintings and a studio full of sketches, and in November 1824, months after his death, the contents of that studio were auctioned in Paris. Other painters copied his horses, cavalrymen and studies, for practice and for sale, and the catalogues of his work have spent a long time separating those copies from his own hand.
Copy after Géricault is the label a museum gives to such a picture. The composition is his and the brushwork belongs to someone else, usually someone with no name. It makes no claim that Géricault ever touched it, and that is what separates it from a work attributed to him.
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston the label is used for a copy that repeats, on a smaller wooden panel, his oil sketch of a wounded cuirassier now in the Brooklyn Museum.
