The Storm, or The Wreck

This is a sketch, about 19 by 25 centimetres. A figure lies stretched out on a strip of shore below a dark cliff, waves break white behind it, and a thin band of light opens on the horizon under a storm sky. The Louvre connects it with a larger version of the scene in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, and records that the idea came from a painting by Horace Vernet, now in the museum at Lons-le-Saunier in the Jura. Horace was one of Géricault's closest friends, and storms at sea ran in his family. His grandfather Claude-Joseph Vernet had made his name with shipwrecks and rough coasts in the previous century. The name Géricault written at the lower left is not his own signature, the Louvre notes. The sketch came to the museum in 1893 as a gift from Alfred Chaber.