Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

In the summer of 1819 Géricault was finishing the largest canvas of his life, the wreck of the Medusa, seven metres wide, which he sent to the Salon that August. In the same stretch of months he painted this: the son of a Paris architect, eight or nine years old, sitting very still in a feathered hat. The boy's uncle, the painter Dedreux-Dorcy, was Géricault's closest friend, which is how a child of that household came to sit for him at all. Alfred grew up to paint horses and riders for a fashionable clientele, the subject Géricault himself had spent most of his short career on. Delacroix, who had modelled for one of the figures lying on the raft, later owned this small portrait.