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Raft of the medusa6/23/2023 Hubert Wellington said that while Delacroix was a lifelong admirer of Gros, the dominating enthusiasm of his youth was for Géricault. Both the choice of subject matter and the heightened manner in which the dramatic moment is depicted are typical of Romantic painting-strong indications of the extent to which Géricault had moved from the prevalent Neoclassical movement. It was a further departure from the religious or classical themes of earlier works because it depicted contemporary events with ordinary and unheroic figures. The unblemished musculature of the central figure waving to the rescue ship is reminiscent of the Neoclassical, however the naturalism of light and shadow, the authenticity of the desperation shown by the survivors and the emotional character of the composition differentiate it from Neoclassical austerity. The work represents, in the words of Christine Riding, "the fallacy of hope and pointless suffering, and at worst, the basic human instinct to survive, which had superseded all moral considerations and plunged civilised man into barbarism". Géricault's raft pointedly lacks a hero, and his painting presents no cause beyond sheer survival. The Raft of the Medusa contains the gestures and grand scale of traditional history painting however, it presents ordinary people, rather than heroes, reacting to the unfolding drama. Gérard, immensely successful painter of portraits under the Empire-some of them admirable-fell in with the new vogue for large pictures of history, but without enthusiasm." His most docile pupil, Girodet, a refined and cultivated classicist, was producing pictures of astonishing frigidity. The master himself was nearing his end, and exiled in Belgium. According to Wellington, "The curious blend of classic with realistic outlook which had been imposed by the discipline of David was now losing both animation and interest. ![]() In his introduction to The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, Hubert Wellington wrote about Delacroix's opinion of the state of French painting just prior to the Salon of 1819. In France, both history painting and the Neoclassical style continued through the work of Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, François Gérard, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Pierre-Narcisse Guérin-teacher of both Géricault and Delacroix-and other artists who remained committed to the artistic traditions of David and Nicolas Poussin. By 1815, Jacques-Louis David, then in exile in Brussels, was both the leading proponent of the popular history painting genre, which he had perfected, and a master of the Neoclassical style. Géricault's compositional structure and depiction of the figures are classical, but the contrasting turbulence of the subject represents a significant change in artistic direction and creates an important bridge between Neoclassical and Romantic styles. In its insistence on portraying an unpleasant truth, The Raft of the Medusa was a landmark in the emerging Romantic movement in French painting, and "laid the foundations of an aesthetic revolution" against the prevailing Neoclassical style.
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