The Three Skulls

In 1812 the young Théodore Géricault made his debut at the Paris Salon with a dashing cavalry officer on a rearing horse, exactly the kind of Napoleonic glamour the moment seemed to demand, as the emperor's army marched east into Russia. Around the same time he set himself a very different subject, three skulls laid out on a bare surface and studied in cool, even light. He was barely 21. The pull toward the body and toward death would run through his whole short life. A few years later he would haunt a Paris morgue, studying severed heads and limbs for his great shipwreck picture. Géricault himself was dead by 32.