How a 27 year old painter almost brought down the French Monarchy
A story of ship wreck, murder, suicide & cannibalism…
On 2nd July 1816, a French naval ship named Méduse with 400 people suffered a ship wreck after running aground off the coast of Northwest Africa. The 20 life boats available on deck could only carry the “upper-ranked” 253 Frenchmen & the rest 147 had to built an improvised raft out of ship debris to keep them from drowning.
The raft was hooked to the remaining lifeboats & the 400 men set sail in the middle of the ocean to be rescued. But as fate would have it, the raft of the 147 was cut loose from the rest of the pack — the “upper-ranked” men on the life boat felt that the wooden raft was slowing them down & set the raft free
147 men cast adrift without any food or water. What ensued on the raft left the French monarchy shocked & embarrassed at the time.
On the first night, 20 men were murdered on the raft. The following days saw a streak of murders & suicides and by the fifteenth day only 13 men survived — some by resorting to cannibalism & feeding on to the bodies of the deceased. The 13 were eventually saved after another ship in the ocean spotted the sailing raft & rescued the survivors
Meanwhile in Rome…
Théodore Géricault, a 27 year old French painter who had moved to Rome in an attempt to kickstart his art career, knew that his search for a muse had ended after hearing about the raft of the Medusa.
Géricault had immersed himself completely in creating a masterpiece from the incident of Medusa. His passion took him to French morgues where he would study the features of deceased men from Medusa. He even built his own scaled down version of the raft in his art studio. He ended up interviewing two of the survivors to find the the perfect moment that would set the narrative for his masterpiece — the desperate rescue call of an African slave aboard the raft on seeing a ship on the ocean horizon.
On the exhibition day…
The Raft of Medusa byThéodore Géricault was first shown in 1819 at Paris Salon & had instantly become the star of the exhibition for most of the audience. However, the subject matter of the painting repelled many, especially the members of the French monarchy.
Why so? Turns out that the captain of the Medusa who’d let the ship go off-guard hadn’t been into the sea for nearly 20 years & was nominated because of his bureaucratic relationships with the corrupt members of the monarchy
At the end of the exhibition, the painting was awarded the gold medal by the judging panel but they did not give the painting the prestige of selecting it for the Louvre national collection.
A few days after the exhibition, Géricault retreated to the countryside, where he collapsed from exhaustion, and his unsold work was rolled up and stored in a friend’s studio.
The fate of the painting? Many years later the painting was eventually sold to an art curator from the Louvre by one of Géricault’s heir from the Louvre.
Guess Géricault had the last laugh after all!
PS: Can you spot the ship the African man is waiving at in the painting? In reality, the ship in the painting just went past the raft without noticing the raft & the 13 men were rescued on a different occasion
