受伤的胸甲骑兵

The Salon of 1814 opened in Paris months after Napoleon had abdicated and been shipped off to Elba. Two years earlier Géricault had made his debut at the same Salon with an officer of the imperial guard charging, horse rearing, everything pitched forward. This time he sent in a cuirassier coming away from the fighting, backing a frightened horse down a slope with his sabre held low. He was 23 and had not fought in the wars he was painting.

What hangs in the Géricault room at the Louvre here is the oil study, where he worked the pose out before the full-size canvas. Two such studies are known. This one came to the museum in 1878 as a gift from the collector Aimé Charles His de la Salle, and the other is in Brooklyn.