Académie d'homme tirant sur une corde

An academie was the exercise every young French painter cut his teeth on: a single nude studied from the live model in the studio, muscle by muscle. Gericault made this one around 1812, when he was barely into his twenties and years away from the huge, doomed shipwreck scene that would make his name. He poses the man in hard profile, heaving on a rope with his feet in shallow water, the whole body strained into the pull. It is a study rather than a finished story, but you can already see what he cared about, the physical effort, the weight, the tension in living muscle. The painter Leon Bonnat, who owned it, left it to his home town of Bayonne.