The Death of Géricault

Théodore Géricault died in Paris on 26 January 1824, at the end of a long illness, and Ary Scheffer painted this small canvas the same year. Both had been pupils of the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Scheffer shows the sickroom with two friends keeping watch, whom the Louvre names as Colonel Bro de Comères, a cavalry officer, and the painter Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy, Géricault's closest friend. Dedreux-Dorcy's loyalty went further than the bedside. When the contents of the studio were auctioned that November, the state was not prepared to bid more than 5,000 francs for The Raft of the Medusa. He bought it himself for around 6,000 and then let the Louvre have it for what he had paid. Scheffer signed and dated this picture and showed it at the Salon that winter, outside the printed catalogue. It stayed with his brother Henry, also a painter, and the Louvre bought it from him in 1858, the year Ary died.