Théodore Géricault

In July 1816, the French naval frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of what is now Mauritania. Its captain, a royalist appointee with barely any sea experience, had been given the post through political connections rather than skill. When the ship broke apart, officers took the lifeboats and set 147 passengers and crew adrift on a hastily built raft, cut loose and left to drift. Thirteen days later only about 15 people were still alive, and the scandal, aimed squarely at the restored French monarchy that had made the appointment, was the talk of Paris.

Théodore Géricault, then 27, spent months preparing a huge canvas on the subject. He interviewed two of the survivors, had a carpenter build a scale model of the raft in his studio, and rented rooms near a Paris hospital so he could sketch the skin tones of corpses and amputated limbs for the dying figures in the foreground. The finished painting, more than 7 metres wide, went on show at the 1819 Salon under the deliberately neutral title A Shipwreck Scene, though everyone in Paris already knew exactly which shipwreck it showed.

Géricault never had long to enjoy the fame it brought him. An enthusiastic and reckless horseman, he never fully recovered from a series of riding falls, and in 1824, the same year Constable won a gold medal in Paris partly on the strength of Géricault's own praise for him, Géricault died of an infected spinal abscess at 32.