Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) - Romantic Machismo

Théodore Géricault
Horse Race
1816-17
oil on paper
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Théodore Géricault
Riderless Racers at Rome
1817
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Théodore Géricault
Riderless Horse Races, Rome
1817
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"Whatever subject Géricault turned to – portraiture, scenes of military life, landscape, animals – he could transform from prose to poetry, from fact to symbol, thereby deeply unsettling the foundations of the traditional hierarchy of subject matter, which still reigned officially under the Bourbon Restoration.  One is again reminded of his genius when looking at Carle and Horace Vernets' picturesque documents [example directly below] of an event recorded by the many artists, and even by writers like Goethe, who visited Rome: the annual spectacle of a race of riderless horses down the Corso, the so-called corso dei barberi, which was illustrated as early as the late 1770s by a Scottish artist, David Allan.  But unlike Géricault, who, in a series of paintings of 1816-17, miraculously succeeded in recreating this tourist attraction as a poetic metaphor of literally unbridled passion momentarily restrained and then released by the disciplining forces of man, the paintings by the two Vernets (father and son) offer only a prosaic, if vivid account of a colorful pageant, a festa of rearing horses, holiday costumes, noisy crowds.  Their interpretation, that is, remains still within the conventional realm of a lower order of genre and animal painting, never elevating its subject to that symbolic power which both Géricault and Delacroix attained in even their most humble themes."  

French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution, exhibition catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1975)

Horace Vernet
Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses, Rome
1820
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Théodore Géricault
Capture of a Wild Horse
1817
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Théodore Géricault
Cattle Market
ca. 1818-19
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Harvard Art Museums

Théodore Géricault
Turkish Cavalier in Combat
ca. 1818
wash drawing
Art Institute of Chicago
 
Théodore Géricault
Warrior with a Spear
ca. 1816
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Théodore Géricault
Académie
before 1824
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Théodore Géricault
Shipwreck Survivor
ca. 1817-18
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Théodore Géricault
Académie
ca. 1815
wash drawing
British Museum

Théodore Géricault
Boxer Facing Right, and Men Wrestling
ca. 1818-19
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Théodore Géricault
Figure Studies for Raft of the Medusa
1818
drawing
Princeton University Art Museum

Théodore Géricault
Study for Raft of the Medusa
1818
wash drawing
Harvard Art Museums