Théodore Géricault

Théodore Géricault was a French painter whose short career helped launch the Romantic movement. His huge Raft of the Medusa, now in the Louvre, turned a recent shipwreck scandal into a scene of suffering and hope and caused a sensation at the Salon of 1819. He loved horses and painted them often, and he spent time in England, where he made lithographs of London street life. He died at thirty-two after a series of riding accidents, leaving a group of remarkable portraits of the mentally ill.