This large painting (491 cm high and 716 cm wide) represents a tragic episode in the history of the French colonial fleet: the sinking of the ship Méduse.

In June 1816, the ship “La Méduse”, with three other French ships, left France for the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal. Senegal was a gift to the French by the British as a sign of goodwill towards the restored King Louis XVIII.

The ship transported 400 people: civil servants, military personnel and administrators. The ship’s captain was Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had not been on a ship for 25 years and had never commanded a ship in his life, but who was friends with the “right” people.

His mistakes caused the ship to sink in a short time. Officials and soldiers, including the captain, got into lifeboats but there was not enough room for everyone and 150 people were forced to get on a raft. What happen after was a two-week nightmare of rough seas, brutal murders, madness and cannibalism. Of the 150 people on the raft, only fifteen survived, and five of them died shortly after their rescue. The shipwreck became an international scandal, because a French captain in the service of the newly restored monarchy was responsible for the disaster due to his incompetence.

Theodore Géricault, then 27 years old, painted this picture two years after the trial of Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys. The painter had studied the subject in depth and read a review written by two survivors. He visited hospitals and morgues to study the dying and the dead, and then set up a replica raft on the sea to watch it roll over the waves. Géricault even cut out body parts from the corpses in the local morgue and left them to decompose in his studio for reference.

With this painting, Géricault was criticising society and the incompetent government, and showing that artists can have a very powerful voice when they want to.