Théodore Géricault

Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was born on 26 September 1791 in France, into a world of neoclassical restraint he would help shatter. He turned to painting and lithography, drawn to raw emotion and immediacy over polished decorum. His best-known work, The Raft of the Medusa, pulled from a recent maritime disaster and forced viewers to confront suffering at full scale. That canvas and the intensity driving it marked him as one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement. He died on 26 January 1824, thirty-two years old, having cracked open a new path in less than a decade.