1861 Ernest Chesneau – Théodore Géricault
Géricault Life
1870 (circa) L’Odalisque allongée (Detail) Jean-Joseph-Benjamin Constant, Musée d’Orsay.
Ernest Chesneau published his study of Théodore Géricault: “Le Mouvement moderne en peinture: Géricault in the Revue Européene, XVII, 1 October, 1861 (pp. 483-511).
Ernest Chesneau’s 1861 Géricault
“In 1815, a sort of terror pressed down upon the artists of France, dividing them into two camps: those of the tradition of David, and those of romantic innovation. In every studio, even the most overtly independent, one very real emotion hung over the painters and sculptors, one apprehension occupied them as they stood before their works. The violence of this furious battle, the brags, the ironic insults, and jeers displayed clearly to the public the unusual state of the French school. The partisans of tradition, themselves, were not as sure as they wished to appear; they feared they were not representing faithfully enough the doctrines of their exiled master. The young new school felt, hovering upon it, the withering gaze of this master whom they had never known, and whose name was their own call to arms. Reacting against this irritating presence, the new school exaggerated the manifestations of his influence. In fact, the two parties were agitated and worried to an equal degree – the state of unhappiness was general. The city of art was gripped in a despair similar to that which took hold in the city of Rhodes in the 15th century, when, according to legend, a rumor took hold within the city walls that a sea monster had chosen to live upon the shores of the island. Eventually, a knight of Rhodes stepped forward with two fighting mastiffs to rescue the city. Aided by God, the knight slew the monster.
The troubles between the schools lasted ten years. In 1825, the followers of David announced the exhibition of his latest painting: Mars and Venus. They believed the time had come to strike a great blow and fix public opinion forever in favor of the principles guiding the hand of their master, manifest, it was said, in this his final masterpiece. They wanted to prove beyond all doubt that David, who had just died, remained the only master elevated enough to serve as a model, whose lessons offered a guarantee for the future and the promise of certainty for troubled souls. In the camp of the romantics emotions roiled, imaginations swung wildly. Romantics feared defeat, for the prestige which the name David carried was powerful still. The moment arrived and crowds poured into the exhibition hall. The victory was dramatic. That evening the studios of the old master descended into mourning and a boundless joy flooded through the studios of the romantics. Chests swelled the next morning and lungs filled more easily. The terrible burden weighing down upon them had been removed; fear gave way to cries of victory. The monster had been defeated!
But the true champion of their battle was not then on the field to celebrate this victory. The initiator of the romantic movement, he who would have directed it and kept it within its correct limits, Géricault – the first who dared to bring his axe down upon the tree of pseudo-Greek restoration, died in 1824. He did not live to witness the striking impact of his reforms, he left before these had even been assured, as he had no doubt dreamed they would. Géricault shared in all the glory of this moment of triumph despite his absence. Yet, had he lived, the liberties consecrated following the exhibition of the painting of Mars and Venus might have been won in a less contentious manner, and perhaps more definitively. In art, we would not still be discussing the legitimacy of certain principles which Géricault introduced and espoused; these by now would carry the force of law, the authority of accomplished fact. What then are these principles discovered by him? The answer to this question can only be uncovered by examining the works and the life of this young master.
I
A proud and melancholy soul, a generous heart, a character brimming with energy, a spirit taxed and stretched too thin, perhaps, but still firm and precise, forged in Géricault a temperament ready for rebellion. His blood ran fast. He was consumed easily in the passion of the moment. The composure of his race was often insufficient, in times of reflection, to calm his rages. His chivalrous nature transformed men his own age into totally devoted friends, and members of the younger generation into veritable fanatics. He was quick to express admiration. But not to the point of enthusiasm; enthusiasm had to be earned. All those who knew him retained a profound regard for the artist, bordering almost on veneration. A soft aura of nobility seemed to emanate from his brow, an aura which portraits never quite captured. To all the qualities we expect of a reformer – decisiveness, strength, sincerity, Géricault added a particular gift: his irresistable seductive power. I know of a friend of his youth who describes a habitual dream of his, in which the artist’s phantom speaks to him these simple words: “Ah! hello,” in a tone so cordial and so soft that the impression remains in his heart for the rest of the day. (Mr. Belloc, the honorable and capable director of the Special Imperial School of Design and Mathematics.) The negro Joseph, who posed for Géricault often, described the painter only in terms of the greatest respect, referring to him always as Monsieur Géricault, even many years after the artist’s death. Géricault was manifestly charming.
The son of an advocate of Rouen, the future painter of the Medusa was born in 1791. Géricault spent his first years in a world of near permanent darkness, according to one contemporary historian, a time during which the sun never shone, that sad period during the glorious and precious heritage of the Revolution, a period which France will eternally regret. This shadow seems to have imprinted itself upon the young child. Géricault preserved a somberness from these early years within him which appears in his paintings. He never painted a woman, nor a child, nor a sun. We have to ask if this young man, noted for his grace and his elegance and who emanated a kind of moral sensibility, was himself insensitive to grace and unable to ever perceive the light.
Géricault quit Rouen, his place of birth, to enter the Lycée Napoleon (the College Napoleon) in Paris. But there his love of independence cut short his studies. Like Gros, he had a very strong passion for horses from a very early age, and the first employment Géricault made of his eventual freedom was to present himself at the home of Carle Vernet, the painter of horses of the greatest renown. Before entering this studio, the youth somehow, without any guide, and for his personal satisfaction, had drawn many horses, but naïvely. He had simply reproduced them as nature presented them. He loved the horse for itself, for its form and function; he had no preference for a particular breed, the reality of the horse sufficed; show horses, or coach horses, Arabian horses, Normans, or Mecklembourgeois, he found all equally worthy for his pencil. As such, young Géricault was likely surprised by the practices of Carle Vernet, correcting nature with a false elegance. Géricault joined the studio to paint horses and found himself painting greyhounds instead; he soon left.
His studies following his time with Carle Vernet were of such a brief duration that we would need make little note of them in his education as a painter, had the opposition he encountered then not confirmed in his mind the importance of studying reality.
Once admitted into the studio of Guérin, we see the temperament of revolt which we feel we must attribute to Géricault revealed again. There, Géricault submitted docilely to the councils of that faithful propagator of the lessons of David, but only for as long as he was under his master’s eye. Géricault then applied principles which were the exact opposite of the teachings of Guérin’s school to his own work. Guérin was dismayed at the audacity of this disciple, who effortlessly imprinted a new and highly personal character, to say the least, upon his copies after the antique, and upon classical models. Without doubting his good will, Guérin could not have been more stunned to see the immobile representations typical of his studio acquire a new vigor under the brush of Géricault; the powerful vitality of these reproductions hid their precision from the master. The professor believed he had a duty to persuade this young man to seek another career and forget about becoming an artist; he denied his vocation and, seeing him persist, abandoned him – as one does with bad students, leaving Géricault to freely exercise his fantasies.
The time which Géricault did not pass in the studio he consecrated to serious study in the museums. The Louvre was then the richest museum in Europe. All the masters of all the schools passed beneath the ardent brush of the young painter. He saw all, copied all, and with a perfect ignorance of the learning process. It was thus that he developed the ability to give a personal touch to all his interpretations. The Michelangelos, the Correggios, the Flemish painters each became “Géricaults” under his fiery brush. He rediscovered the great tradition of execution, the grand touch, fat and individual which many painters today strive to employ, yet lack the will to train their hands and their minds with the discipline which Géricault imposed upon himself. Their lack of success is quite simply the result of their sloth and indolence. That which they admire with good reason is the result of labor to a very large degree. His fortune permitted him an easy life, his pleasures became occasions for study. It was his taste for horses, for his fashionable and social relations, that decided the course of his career. Until then, his family and the meticulous Guérin, as we have seen, made every effort to place shackles upon his development, and the application of artistic knowledge.
Finally, in 1812, Géricault presented his Portrait Equestre de M. Dieudonné (Equestrian Portrait of Mr. Dieudonné, or the Charging Chasseur) in the uniform of a scout’s officer of the imperial guard at the Salon. Everyone understood that this was the work of a strong personality. This is a portrait which compels immediate admiration. At that time, however, the general sense was one of stupefaction. Yet, David was moved. Standing before the painting, the master no doubt recalled the immobility of his Bonaparte at Saint-Bernard, while noting all the partial defects of the work of the younger man. Still David must have acknowledged to himself how the grandeur, the thrust, the style, the good style – all went straight to his heart, stirring his emotions before he could even begin to analyze the work. The strong and intelligent master perhaps saw, even then, a formidable adversary in this young painter who, at twenty, had dared to take on the problem of the calm cavalier upon a furious steed, and who had done so completely and so purposefully, succeeding where the master himself had failed. The following year, Géricault presented the Cuirassier Quittant le Feu (Wounded Cavalryman Leaving the Field).
The Charging Chasseur and the Wounded Cavalryman are now in the Louvre. A strong claim can be made that Géricault, in the conception of these two canvases, borrowed from the patriotism and chivalry of the past. Without unconditionally accepting this hypothesis, let us say that it seduces our imaginations, there are certain legends it is good to maintain, whatever their antagonistic relation with cold reason. It is why one loves to find in the Charging Chasseur an allusion to the intrepid daring of our armies setting out to conquer the world; and in the Wounded Cavalryman the mournful symbol of our reverses amidst the icy plains of the North. We must deploy a measure of good will on this point. For my part, I assert that I have never seen the faintest appearance of snow beneath the feet of the cavalryman, (it is likely that the first to imagine this fable confused the original with a poor pastiche signed with the name of Odier, and who is from Luxembourg). Nevertheless, one cannot deny that the sentiment of resigned sadness permeating the composition is admirable; the general attitude, the expression of the head, the eyes raised towards a leaden sky suffices to justify the poetic error of those who found there the emblem of national disaster.
One could see in the two paintings of which we speak the first and last songs of a saga, or epic; nothing appeals more to literary spirits; but do not forget that literary genius is the enemy of pictoresque genius. Indeed, from the point of view of artistic merit, all the other canvases of Géricault at the Louvre are superior to these two. The Carabinier, a simple portrait study en buste, (as a bust) is painted in magisterial fashion. The master, the master painter is revealed here for the first time in this work. Until he produced the Carabinier, Géricault was doing little more than learning to perfect and control his complete individuality; from this point forward he had only to produce.
Which is precisely what he would have had to do, had he been the chief of a school – a role wrongly assigned to him. Géricault had a rather somber nature. He enjoyed his pleasures quickly and then sought to escape to himself. To distract himself from the moral lassitude which sometimes overwhelmed him during the first days of the Restoration, he entered the Maison-Rouge, or the Royal Household. For three months he wore the gorgeous costume of a musketeer. This was enough to cure him of his taste for uniforms, however. He returned to his brushes with a new ardor, and in this epoch he began to prepare some great work in which he could test the measure of his talent. He dreamed, it is said, of executing the moving subject of the retreat from Russia in a vast composition. But the Empire had been defeated; he understood that recalling then the failures of the vanquished would not be generous or wise. So, as the liberal opinions of the time were those he shared, he chose to absent himself and departed for Italy. There, while continuing to follow his studies after the masters, he hoped perhaps to find a subject for a painting.
Some critics believed that they could make the case that Géricault’s time in Italy had a deleterious impact upon the talent of the artist. The contrary seems apparent to us, and it is difficult to explain their error. If one could hear him, upon his return, speaking less strongly in favor of those he admired from his early years; if, in Géricault’s view, Rubens no longer occupied the same high rank; it is because he had – in Rome, in Florence, in Venice – compared all their splendor with that of geniuses of a different order, and for which his own had a greater affinity. Rubens, the painter of good health, pink bodies, bright fabrics and artificial and natural riches, had managed to seduce the imagination of the young man; but, as the character of Géricault opened him, melancholy and sometimes sinister impressions haunted his spirit. Rubens could do nothing more for him than offer a compromise with his own sentiments. That which flattered the young artist in the works of the painter of Anvers, was also the realization, in the hand of the master, of his own naturalist instincts; and he realized that he had to precisely govern these instincts, which Guérin had so vigorously opposed. He also sensed that he had to divest himself of the influence of the teachings of the school that had taken on picturesque processes. He told himself that the participation of the Italian masters, so numerous and so diverse, were the best counterpoint to the double domination which he had endured, and that these would add new powers, and balance the various ones within him. The calculation was correct, but it would not come quickly. The trip to Italy left him with a visible uncertainty for several years; all that he had seen and admired appealed to him equally. These forces raging within him did not calm, subside, or settle all in moment, or easily allow him to modify, according to his personal and definitive feelings, the picturesque reflection of nature and of humanity in their dramatic, or touching interplay. We must profoundly regret this period of uncertainty, as it helped ensure that Géricault’s first great composition would also be his last.
II
When he returned from Italy, Géricault found the French school limping along on crutches under the hesitant direction of the students of David. One can gauge something of this tentativeness today by strolling through the insignificant handbook of the Salon of 1819. The Restoration had returned to favor the religious manifestations persecuted under the Republic and forgotten under the Empire, when war was the sole preoccupation. All the documents that serve as the moral history of an epoch have been lost, only by the inspection of booklets can one begin to reconstruct the principal elements. We see that it is the actions of a group of ordinary individuals who dominate the art of their times, one sees the training of a lower order, not of artists, but of artisans, seizing each new occasion to expand their commerce in painting by catering to the tastes of the day. The art of the Empire transformed mythology into a contraband market of modern warriors of doubtful quality. The Restoration referred these gods and heroes to the costumer, and the camp cooks, the hussars, the grenadiers returned to the Salon in the habits of Virgins, of Christs, and of Saints: a transformation so rapid and miserable that a simple mention suffices to dispatch. The great painters of the national school would, however, figure in the Salon of 1819; but were themselves already eating away at themselves. David sent his painting of Cupid and Psyche to Paris, which he exhibited just around the corner from the Louvre, and which even his friends dared not defend. Gros produced for this moment the Embarcation of the Duchess of Angouleme, which in truth was nothing more remarkable than any group of fishermen. Gérard put the last touch to the portrait of the Duchess of Orleans, which one does not dare compare to his portrait of Josephine of 1802. The three celebrated artists, who had battled so hard for their school, abandoned the principles of their teaching in 1819, be it by their choice of subjects – like Gros and Gérard, or by the execution, like David (1- “Sensitive to the reproach that he was little more than an imitator, and a copier even of antiquity, David assembled all his instinct and his talent in his power to imitate nature, without searching to modify and embellish it, and thus produced the painting of Cupid and Psyche.” ‘(Louis David, son école et son temps, souvenirs, par M. E.-J. Delécluze.). Girodet, alone, bravely maintained the tradition of his master, and presented the painting of Pygmalion and Galatea without compromising himself or his master. Recall the figure of Pygmalion to those who know the painting, even only from the engraving, to judge the work. In this exhibition only the Gustave Wasa of Hersent, two or three canvases of Mr. Ingres, and the beautiful Assumption of Prudhon could withstand such a test.
All knew then the state of affairs. Géricault learned of the work underway in the major studios and judged the occasion favorable to measure himself against the illustrious names of the school; he believed the moment had arrived to demonstrate his talent in a stunning manner. The public remained focused on reports of an immense maritime disaster written by Mr. Corréard, one of the few survivors of the shipwreck of the Medusa:
“The frigate Medusa, accompanied by three other vessels: the corvette Echo, the transport Loire and the brig Argus, departed France on the 17th of June 1816, bearing to Saint-Louis (Senegal) the governor and principal employees of this colony. There were around four hundred men, sailors, and passengers aboard. On the 2nd of July, the frigate struck the Arguin bank, and after five days of unsuccessful efforts to refloat the vessel a raft was constructed; one hundred and forty-nine victims were piled aboard, while all the rest hurried to the ships’ boats. Shortly after, those in the boats severed the cables to those trailing behind, leaving the raft alone in the middle of the immensity of the seas. Hunger, thirst, and despair quickly armed these men one against the other. Finally, on the twelfth day of this super human ordeal, the Argus rescued fifteen dying souls. (Extract from Mr. Corréard.) ”
Géricault seized upon this moving account. He embraced it in every sense, searching for the most picturesque and the most moving. There are a certain number of sketches on the same subject in the collection of Mr. Marcille, and each one is a different composition. In one, the artist chose the moment when, with the blow of an axe, the raft is violently cut loose from the towing boats; he captured the deception, the despair, and the rage of the victims of this betrayal; in another, he depicted the combat of the famished; in a third, he fixed on the final hour of the drama, when the shipwrecked are rescued by the seamen of the Argus. The three variants are beautiful; that he did not adopt the first was, for me, a wise decision; his final conception, which he definitively executed, is infinitely preferable. I hope to explain why.
Before examining the aesthetic merits of this colossal work, let us appreciate first its dramatic values. Although a careful critic must focus more on the skill of the execution than on the subject itself, we must, however, also consider how well the artist understood how to extract all the possible parts from the subject, and what relationship exists between the methods employed and the proposed goal. We have indicated the three episodes over which the painter deliberated. In the first two, he expressed in different degrees the horror of the drama before its ultimate climax: the abandonment and the combat. In the final, he presents nothing but the climax: salvation. – The painting comprises the three acts of this terrifying poem through their synthesis.
Upon the roiling waves, an unsteady platform of poorly-joined planks carries a handful of men abandoned to the anguish of an imminent death, by starvation, or by the blade. At the base of the mast of fortune, some among them have settled. Roused from their lethargic hallucinations by a shout of rescue, they rise slowly, and with the greatest of efforts direct themselves towards one end of the raft. There, supported by his companions in distress, a negro climbs onto an empty barrel and waves a piece of cloth into the sea winds. It is a desperate signal to the crew of the brig, which the less defeated shipwrecked discern as a grey silhouette on the horizon. There had been one hundred and fifty, nine-tenths succumbed. And the waves that crashed against the debris of mast and riggings with a relentless regularity, still washed the last cadavers suspended here and there by some firm member.
This is the third great depiction of horror signed by a French hand in this century. The first are Orestes by Hennequin, and the Sons of Brutus by Lethière. There would later be one other: the Massacre of Chios by Mr. Eugène Delacroix.
In the definitive execution of the Raft of the Medusa, the painter was able to group each of the dispersed elements in the earlier projects. The same sentiment dominates all: horror. But the painting expresses also the abandonment and the fighting – interrupted by the exhaustion of the combatants; finally, it depicts the climax, the moment of rescue in a clear and precise manner. It is this same point which displays the greatest effort placed in the composition.
The voyage to Italy had taught to Géricault that the masters refined, prepared, and brought forward by a series of successive efforts, the main action of their important works, and that after finding this, they reproduced it for the viewer to mark its dominant role. The painter of the Medusa did exactly that. The moral center of his painting is the Argus, the rescue vessel almost imperceptible in the composition. How does Géricault indicate this element to the spectator? In the first plan, the artist employs a cadaver. This inspiring pictorial accessory, although necessary, is certainly repulsive, so he casts a sheet of fabric to veil the corpse and disguise the rigid features. In the second plan, he poses a second cadaver, but here our interest begins. For it is the corpse of a young man; the contrast of the young and the dead compels a feeling of pity that allows the viewer to overcome his revulsion; moreover, he places the body upon the thighs of an old man, his father without doubt, the pathos of this triple opposition serving to link funereal immobility and life, life more actively visible in the neighboring individual, a madman, whose lips open in a crazed laugh, life which is expressed more strongly still in the group of the shipwrecked who kneel and clutch at each other’s clothing to raise themselves up to see, and finally, the point on the horizon where our attention is concentrated upon three energetic individuals who occupy the summit of the pyramid. The progression is thus established: absolute death, pitiful death, madness, the mature man aged by exhaustion, then the reaction of life, arms raise and reach out, bodies stand to move in their full force and all in the same direction towards to that place we have called the moral center. Was the organization still somewhat unclear? To remove any doubt, or ambiguity, the painter ‘doubled’ this first line with a parallel one, one in which, with multiple variations of his magisterial brush, he reproduced the progression what we have analyzed. Here the effects were generated and constrained by the organization of the advanced studies. It is through the expression of the physiognomies that the artist chronicles the expanding movement towards resurrection; and he completes this second line with a single gesture, an arm, a hand, a finger reaching towards the profound scale of the immensity.
Those who speak of works of art without making the effort to study them in all their parts, those, too, who take for the foundation of their appreciation certain geometric laws of a single pyramid invented to simplify most easily the challenge of artistic appreciation, these critics find agreement in blaming Géricault for having structured his painting upon this double scale, which, these critics assert, destroys the unity of the work. We believe that we have demonstrated the contrary by proving that this repetition was both desirable and intentional. Far from distracting the attention of the viewer, it serves as a necessary conduit transporting the viewer to the marked goal. This criticism of the parallelism of the execution reveals nothing but the lack a scrupulous eye. Géricault was too disciplined to permit confusion; while always maintaining his double progression, he took care to concentrate great masses of light upon the first line, leaving the other in a rather thick half-tone. But we touch now upon the details of the execution.
The shock of David’s students standing before the Shipwreck of the Medusa was even greater than their astonishment when confronted by the Equestrian Portrait of Mr. Dieudonné seven years earlier. Their eyes, accustomed to processing fluid and smooth painting, without layers of paint visible to the eye, without substance or body, from a timid design, traced with a template, and mathematically calculated, their eyes could not focus clearly on the audacities of this vigorous hand, who modelled his figures as a physical mass, and in doing so discovered the impact of a powerful and gripping realism. The kneeling seaman extending his right arm offered this audience a vision both stupefying and inexplicable; his vest over a shirt of blue stripes, and the large and sincere manner in which this clothing is rendered, confounded their practical science. They searched in vain in their own works for something comparable to the nude torso of the shipwrecked seaman situated on the extreme right, pushing himself up with one arm and reaching to place his left hand on the thigh of his companion, or some similar finesse with color, or with movement.
But the heart of Guérin must have beat with a mild joy recognizing in the old man contemplating the corpse of his son upon the raft of the Medusa, something of his own old man type from the Sacrifice to Asclepius, which is so similar to his figure of Marcus Sextus. This group, and the two figures who are nearby, carry the palpable traces of the teaching of Guérin. The others feel much in the manner of Caravaggio with less hardness. The painting of Gericault, in this canvas, has the vigor of relief which the Lombard master possessed to the supreme degree, Géricault obtains this effect using the same method of opposing opaque shadows and bright lights; but in his handling of the lights he is infinitely finer and more delicate. One can find in this subject some striking analogies with the Italian school, in the early work of Guido Reni, in particular, who had also studied the methods of Caravaggio. Like le Guide, the French painter, was able to find and create the silver-white tones which gave to the flesh of each figure an entirely personal value. Later, Mr. Delacroix discovered the same secret and employed for the greatest effect in the Barque of Dante. In the Shipwreck of the Medusa, Géricault was able to balance these luminous effects within the slightly somber harmony of the painting, the uniform and somber hues of which had been marvelously chosen for dramatic effect.
We should not judge this last work in any absolute sense; the talent that executed this great composition was still not yet fully developed. He was still encumbered by some uncertainties of direction, and of nostalgias which maturity would make disappear. His individuality would have asserted itself each day, affirming and demanding more and more of that which was indicated in the Charging Chasseur, the Wounded Cuirassier, the Carabinier, and the Shipwreck of the Medusa. These are the tendencies that we discover in these four paintings and which we must now appreciate….”
Read Part II of Chesneau’s essay here.