Chat mort

Géricault painted this dead cat around 1820, just after finishing the enormous canvas that made his name, The Raft of the Medusa, with its shipwrecked survivors and its studies of the dead. A limp cat on a bare plank belongs to that same restless year, when he kept circling back to dead and dying things. For most of the next two centuries no one knew the picture was his. It slipped out of sight after his early death in 1824, and when it resurfaced a Paris collector took it for a Chardin, the celebrated 18th-century painter of quiet still lifes. Only later was it recognised as the lost Géricault, and the Louvre bought it in 2003. It is a small thing, about 50 by 61 centimetres, an animal laid out with the same plain seriousness he usually saved for people.