Two hundred years ago today, a French naval frigate ran aground on a sandbank 60 miles off Mauritania. Unable to free it, the crew and passengers took to lifeboats, but they didn’t all fit. So about 150 of them, including a solitary woman, had to squeeze onto a makeshift raft, which was towed by the boats for a while, then cut loose and left to its fate.
When the raft was finally rescued, two weeks later, it had only 15 people left alive, all starving and dehydrated. The rest had gone overboard, voluntarily or otherwise. Some had been cannibalised.
The story created a scandal back in France, still recovering then from the Napoleonic wars (the man himself was now on St Helena). It was all the worse because the incompetent ship’s captain owed his appointment to croneyism under the restored Bourbons.
But it might now be forgotten outside that country had it not been for a young artist, Théodore Géricault. Then 24, and trying to make his name, he became fascinated with the subject and determined to paint it. His meticulous research included interviewing survivors, spending time at sea, and visiting hospitals and morgues, so that he could study the colour and texture of distressed flesh.
It took him nearly three years from conception to completion. Along the way, a friend of the artist invited to view the work in progress testified to its repellant power: “I started running like a madman and did not stop until I reached my room,” he recalled.
But sure enough, despite (or because of) its controversial subject, The Raft of the Medusa made the young painter's reputation and became a milestone in the history of art.
It does not, mind you, feature in EH Gombrich's magisterial book, The Story of Art. There, Géricault is represented by a slightly later painting, on a comparatively banal subject, "Horse-racing at Epsom"; although that too makes for an interesting lesson in visual education.
Like all artists of his time, the Frenchman painted speeding horses as he thought he saw them, with their front and back legs splayed in almost opposite directions.
Fifty years later, as Gombrich notes, photographic stills of racehorses showed that they do not actually move like that. But when painters adapted to scientific reality, “everyone complained that the pictures looked wrong”.
Getting back to the Medusa, there was – inevitably – some Irish involvement in the story. Not on the raft, I am glad to say, nor even the ship. As detailed in a 2007 book – Medusa: The Shipwreck, the Scandal, the Masterpiece, by Jonathan Miles – it centred on a man called Kearney, dispatched by a British commander in Senegal to find survivors from the lifeboats who had made landfall.
One of these relative fortunates was a Charlotte Picard, who published an account of her ordeal in 1824, in the literary style then prevalent.
Thus, when she and her mother woke up somewhere and saw “a group of large, bearded Moors” looking down from camels, they naturally both fainted again, as women always did during the romantic era.
But then one of the supposed Moors – our man Kearney – saved the day. “Madame, reassure yourself,” he said. “Beneath this Arab costume is an Irishman come here to help you.”
To view Géricault’s painting first hand now, you have to visit the Louvre. But for several weeks in 1821, you could have seen it Dublin, at the Rotunda. Not many people did, apparently. An exhibition featuring it had been a big success in London, but was ignored by the Irish newspapers and clashed with another show – a “moving panorama” – on the same subject.
So the painting went back to France, where the Louvre bought it in 1824. Alas, poor Géricault, his place in history (if not his grasp of equine mechanics) by then secure, was already dead, from TB and other ailments, aged 32.
Its unsuccessful debut here notwithstanding, his masterpiece eventually earned appreciation in Ireland, and continues to do so in ways the artist himself could not have imagined. It inspired the cover, for example, of The Pogues' 1985 album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, with the band members superimposed on some of the original figures.
Not quite so irreverently, the painting was also reworked in a pop-art version by Robert Ballagh in 2009. He was looking for an image of the people of Ireland that year, after they had been abandoned to their fate by bad luck and banking incompetence. The Raft of the Medusa supplied the perfect metaphor.