Une scène de déluge

Girodet showed this at the Paris Salon of 1806, a drowning family clinging to a single breaking branch above the water. Four years later the French state ran a once-in-a-decade competition to name the best history painting of the age, and it handed the prize to this dark, straining picture, over the Sabine Women of Jacques-Louis David. That stung, because David had been Girodet's teacher. The subject is not the biblical Flood but an ordinary catastrophe. A father tries to save his own father, his wife, and his children all at once, and the old man's weight is already pulling the branch loose. Girodet died in 1824, and the canvas went to the Louvre the same year.