Théodore Géricault

1791 (Rouen, France) – 1824 (Paris)

Guérin taught Géricault, though he appears to have driven Guérin to despair. Delacroix was his fellow-student. Fleeing a failed affair, Géricault joined Delacroix and Ingres in Rome. He met Lawrence in London (his masterpiece having failed to set Paris alight, and his uncle’s wife having borne his child), and David in Brussels. Delacroix, who admired Géricault’s colour but tried to control his own “plastic ardours” posed for one of the figures in ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, and introduced him to Bonington. Georget owned, and almost certainly commissioned, a series of sympathetic portraits Géricault painted of psychiatric patients.