The Wreck of the Medusa by Jonathan Miles

Details of the incident, which had happened three years earlier when a French frigate en route to establish a colony in Senegal beached on the Bank of Arguin, were on every lip following the sensational publication in 1818 of an account by two of the 15 survivors of the disaster and of the government's callous response to it.īy focusing on the intense friendship Gericault formed with one of the account's authors, Alexandre Correard, a brash, young engineer dodging scandals of his own, Jonathan Miles reconstructs one of the most riveting relationships in modern cultural history. Given the tattered, drifting state of his own consciousness at the time, it is not surprising that Gericault should have been drawn to the stew of incompetence and cruelty that left 146 men and one woman clinging to the raft for 13 days off the coast of western Africa.

The grotesque ingredients for the painting that Gericault was assembling were crucial, he believed, to invest with unflinching realism the work on which he was determined to stake his name: The Scene of the Shipwreck or, as it was later rechristened, The Raft of the Medusa. As he lugged into his cramped digs sack after soggy sack of severed limbs and decomposing heads purloined from the nearby hospital, the shame of his illicit love affair with his uncle's beautiful young wife was scarfed under a thickening stench. The 28-year-old French painter had recently rented a rundown studio in the workaday outskirts of northern Paris to immerse himself in his art and to take his tortured conscience off the scandal that was dogging him.

If you've ever wondered what the shifty loner next door was up to, imagine how the neighbours of Theodore Gericault must have felt in the bitter winter of 1819.

The Wreck of the Medusa by Jonathan Miles