Théodore Géricault was a pivotal figure in French Romanticism whose brief life — he died at 32 after a riding accident — produced some of the most viscerally powerful paintings of the 19th century. His masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) depicts survivors of the shipwreck of the French frigate Méduse after 13 days at sea — starving, mad, and reduced to cannibalism. He prepared for the painting by visiting morgues, interviewing survivors, and obtaining actual severed limbs to study. The work was a political bombshell that launched French Romanticism as a movement.
