Étude de bras et de main

By 1818 the wreck of the French frigate Méduse was still a fresh scandal in Paris. It had run aground off West Africa two years earlier, and of about 147 people left on a makeshift raft only 15 came back alive. Géricault decided to build an enormous painting around it, and to get the bodies right he did something unusual. He brought arms, hands and severed heads from a nearby hospital into his studio and painted them as they changed. This quiet study of an arm and a hand comes out of that work. The fingers are worked out one by one, the way you would learn a thing you meant to paint at twice life size.