Study for Wounded Cuirassier

This is a copy, made by an unknown painter after an oil sketch by Théodore Géricault that is now in the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Géricault painted that sketch in 1814 while preparing a large canvas for the Paris Salon, a wounded cavalryman in heavy armour leading his horse down a slope and away from the fighting. The copy follows its model on a smaller scale, about 38 by 32 centimetres, on a wooden panel rather than canvas. It reached America through a Providence dealer, Seth Morton Vose, whose agent Thomas Robinson travelled to France between the 1850s and the 1880s buying pictures, and bought this one in Paris. In 1886 Vose lent it to an exhibition in Providence under the plain title Study, sold it that year to the Boston paper manufacturer Samuel Dennis Warren, and in 1888 Warren gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts.