![]() Nevertheless the painting's pioneering significance was acknowledged by all, a fact that led to its purchase by the fine arts administration and its placement on view, following Géricault's untimely death, in the Salon Carré of the Louvre.ĭespite its damaged state, the overall high quality of the painting at the New York Historical Society is manifest. Exhibited at the Salon of 1819, Géricault's painting depicting the final episode of the ordeal, the sighting of the Argus by the desperate castaways on the raft, elicited controversial reactions from the critics, polarized by its politicized subject and bewildered by its groundbreaking realism. Two of the survivors, the Medusa's surgeon Henri Savigny and its engineer/geographer Alexandre Corréard, published an account of the wreckage in which they exposed the royal government's corrupt practices, such as appointing an inept aristocrat to be captain of the Medusa. The scant fifteen survivors were finally rescued by a brig named Argus. Inspired by a resounding political scandal in Bourbon Restoration France that erupted in July 1816, the painting alluded to the ordeal of about one hundred and fifty passengers of the shipwrecked flagship Medusa consigned to a makeshift raft set adrift in the ocean off the coast of West Africa for thirteen days during which they knew every kind of horror-hunger, thirst, mutiny, murder, insanity, suicide, and cannibalism. The story of Géricault's monumental painting has often been told. The painting is especially compelling to the historian of nineteenth century art for it represents an early testimony of not only the interest aroused by the Medusa tragedy in America-as we shall see-but also of an expanding artistic curiosity that led some American artists abroad to seek out and prize the works of the French modernist avant-garde, thus modulating the prevailing view that early-nineteenth century Americans traveled to Europe in search of Old Master prototypes and academic models almost exclusively. ![]() A contemporary of Géricault, Cooke was in Europe between 18, shortly after Géricault's death. In need of conservation, the painting is now being restored as part of the joint Winterthur Museum-University of Delaware Program in Preservation Studies. Navy commodore and a well-traveled and, by all accounts, cosmopolitan man who also acquired a large fortune in real estate speculation in New York. The picture entered the collections of the museum in 1862 as part of the bequest of three paintings owned by Uriah Phillips Levy (1792–1862), a U.S. Persistence and the help of the museum's curators helped locate the painting and assign it to the American painter George Cooke (1793–1849), in keeping with period sources. It lay forgotten and miscatalogued in the reserves of the New York museum. I came upon this work by sheer luck, led by research while writing a book on Géricault. The New York Historical Society (NYHS) owns a painting that reproduces, in reduced format (130.5 x 196.2 cm), Théodore Géricault's 1819 masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (491 x 716 cm Louvre Museum). George Cook, Copy of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, ca. An American Copy of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |