Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault was a French painter and a pioneer of the Romantic movement, despite dying young. Born in 1791, he burned with energy and ambition, and he is best known for one enormous, shocking painting, The Raft of the Medusa. It depicts the desperate survivors of a real shipwreck adrift at sea, a scandalous choice of subject that turned a recent disaster into a vast, dramatic canvas.

He loved horses and painted them with great power, and late in his life he made a remarkable series of honest, sympathetic portraits of mental hospital patients. His bold subjects and dramatic energy pushed art toward Romanticism. Géricault died in 1824 at just thirty two after a riding accident, leaving a small but electrifying body of work.