Jellyfish raft - Géricault T-Shirt

The Radeau de La Méduse is an oil painting on canvas, created between 1818 and 1819 by the French painter and romantic lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791-1824). His original title, given by Géricault during his first presentation, is Scene of a shipwreck. This painting, of very large dimensions (491 cm high and 716 cm wide), represents a tragic episode in the history of the French Navy: the sinking of the Meduse frigate, which washed up on a sand bank off the coast of present-day Mauritania, on 2 July 1816. At least 147 people stand on a makeshift raft on the surface of the water and only fifteen board the Argus on July 17, a boat came to rescue them. Five people die shortly after arriving in Saint Louis, Senegal, after suffering hunger, dehydration, madness and even cannibalism. The event is becoming an international scandal, in part because a French captain serving the newly restored monarchy is deemed responsible for the disaster, owing to his incompetence. The Radeau de la Méduse presents a certain continuity with the pictorial currents prior to romanticism, notably in the choice of subject and the dramatic character of the representation, but breaks clearly with the order and tranquility of neoclassical painting. By choosing to represent this tragic episode for his first major work, Géricault is aware that the recent character of the shipwreck will attract public interest and allow him to launch his young career. However, the artist also became fascinated by this event, and thus carried out extensive preparatory research and sketches before starting the creation of the painting. Indeed, he meets two of the survivors of the disaster, builds a very detailed model of the structure of the raft, and even visits morgues and hospitals to see with his own eyes the color and texture of the skin of the dying. As Géricault put it, the painting sparked controversy during its first presentation in Paris at the 1819 fair: some are ardent defenders of it, while others are critical of it immediately. Soon after, the work was exhibited in London, which finally established the young painter's reputation in Europe. Today, she is one of the most admired works of French romanticism, and her influence is visible in the creations of painters such as Joseph William Turner, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. The painting, which suffers from an irreversible darkening due to a taste of the bitumen of Judea, is preserved at the Louvre museum, which bought it from a friend of the artist shortly after his death in 1824.