4/18/2023 0 Comments The raft of the medusa![]() ![]() The collision was widely blamed on the incompetence of De Chaumereys, a returned émigré who lacked experience and ability, but had been granted his commission as a result of an act of political preferment. On 2 July, it ran aground on a sandbank off the West African coast, near today's Mauritania. In an effort to make good time, the Méduse overtook the other ships, but due to poor navigation it drifted 160 kilometres (100 mi) off course. ![]() The appointed French governor of Senegal, Colonel Julien-Désiré Schmaltz, and his wife and daughter were among the passengers. The frigate's mission was to accept the British return of Senegal under the terms of France's acceptance of the Peace of Paris. After the wreck, public outrage mistakenly attributed responsibility for his appointment to Louis XVIII, though this was a routine naval appointment made within the Ministry of the Navy and far outside the concerns of the monarch. Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys, a recently returned royalist émigré, had been appointed captain of the frigate by the newly restored Bourbon administration despite having scarcely sailed in 20 years. She headed a convoy of three other ships: the storeship Loire, the brig Argus and the corvette Écho. In June 1816, the French frigate Méduse, captained by Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, departed from Rochefort, bound for the Senegalese port of Saint-Louis. Plan of the Medusa's raft at the moment of its crew's rescue Turner, Gustave Courbet, and Édouard Manet. The painting's influence can be seen in the works of Eugène Delacroix, J. The Louvre acquired it soon after the artist's death at the age of 32. Géricault's work attracted wide attention from its first showing and was then exhibited in London. However, it established his international reputation and today is widely seen as seminal in the early history of the Romantic movement in French painting.Īlthough The Raft of the Medusa retains elements of the traditions of history painting, in both its choice of subject matter and its dramatic presentation, it represents a break from the calm and order of the prevailing Neoclassical school. As he had anticipated, the painting proved highly controversial at its first appearance in the 1819 Paris Salon, attracting passionate praise and condemnation in equal measure. He visited hospitals and morgues where he could view, first-hand, the colour and texture of the flesh of the dying and dead. He interviewed two of the survivors and constructed a detailed scale model of the raft. The event fascinated him, and before he began work on the final painting, he undertook extensive research and produced many preparatory sketches. Géricault chose this large-scale uncommissioned work to launch his career, using a subject that had already generated widespread public interest. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism (the custom of the sea). At 491 by 716 cm (16 ft 1 in by 23 ft 6 in), it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on 2 July 1816. Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. The Raft of the Medusa ( French: Le Radeau de la Méduse ) – originally titled Scène de Naufrage ( Shipwreck Scene) – is an oil painting of 1818–19 by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). For the oratorio, see Das Floß der Medusa. ![]()
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