Works by Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault sketched horses in stables as a boy and later studied them at Versailles and at a carnival race in Rome, and in The Raft of the Medusa he gave a recent French shipwreck a monumental scale.

Carle Vernet taught him the English tradition of sporting pictures, and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin the classical figure, but Géricault soon left the studio to copy Rubens, Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt in the Louvre. In Rome in 1817 he watched the riderless horse race at Carnival and planned a huge canvas of it that he never finished. The Race of the Riderless Horses is one of the studies, almost monochrome, with near-naked men hauling at rearing horses in front of a row of columns.

The Raft of the Medusa shows the survivors of a French ship whose captain had abandoned them, heaped on a raft among the dead while others wave cloths toward the horizon. He prepared it with studies from life such as Study of the Model Joseph, and Eugène Delacroix posed for one of the dying. Taken to London in 1820, the picture was praised there, and in 1821 he painted The 1821 Derby at Epsom, its horses stretched flat out with no hoof on the ground.

He also painted ten portraits of patients of the psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget, each showing a different affliction; five survive, among them Insane Woman, an old woman in a white bonnet whose red-rimmed eyes slide to one side. Riding accidents and tuberculosis wore him down, and he died in Paris in 1824. Prints make up the largest share below, ahead of paintings and drawings, and horses turn up in many of them.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, J. Paul Getty Museum, Louvre. Portrait: Horace Vernet.