Appendix VII

 

Géricault as a negative visionary; for though his art was almost obsessively true to nature, it was true to a nature that had been magically transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of it, for the worse.  'I start to paint a woman,' he once said, 'but it always ends up as a lion.'  More often, indeed, it ended up as something a good deal less amiable than a lion - as a corpse, for example, or as a demon.  His masterpiece, the prodigious Raft of the Medusa, was painted not from life but from dissolution and decay - from bits of cadavers supplied by medical students, from the emaciated torso and jaundiced face of a friend who was suffering from a disease of the liver.  Even the waves on which the raft is floating, even the overarching sky are corpse-coloured.  It is as though the entire universe had become a dissecting room.

      And then there are his demonic pictures.  The Derby, it is obvious, is being run in hell, against a background fairly blazing with darkness visible.  'The Horse startled by Lightning', in the National Gallery, is the revelation, in a single frozen instant, of the strangeness, the sinister, and even infernal otherness that hides in familiar things.  In the Metropolitan Museum there is a portrait of a child.  And what a child!  In his luridly brilliant jacket the little darling is what Baudelaire liked to call 'a budding Satan', un Satan en herbe.  And the study of a naked man, also in the Metropolitan, is none other than the budding Satan grown up.

      From the accounts which his friends have left of him it is evident that Géricault habitually saw the world about him as a succession of visionary apocalypses.  The prancing horse of his early Officier de Chasseurs was seen one morning, on the road to Saint-Cloud, in a dusty glare of summer sunshine, rearing and plunging between the shafts of an omnibus.  The personages in the Raft of the Medusa were painted in finished detail, one by one, on the virgin canvas.  There was no outline drawing of the whole composition, no gradual building up of an over-all harmony of tones and hues.  Each particular revelation - of a body in decay, of a sick man in the ghastly extremity of hepatitis - was fully rendered as it was seen and artistically realized.  By a miracle of genius, every successive apocalypse was made to fit, prophetically, into a harmonious composition which existed, when the first of the appalling visions was transferred to canvas, only in the artist's imagination.