Le Radeau de la Méduse, Théodore Géricault

Le Radeau de la Méduse is an oil painting painted by French painter Théodore Géricault between 1818 and 1819. There is a real story underneath this painting, which is considered to be one of the symbolic names of French romantics and is now exhibited at the Louvre in Paris.

Le Radeau de la Méduse - Théodore Géricault

This portrait tells a real story , In 1816 , After 1 year from Waterloo victory Britain gave a dock in Senegal St.louis to the France , however there was a small problem. The captain de Chaumereys is a 53 years old man , who never ruled a fleet or ship , however he become one with his network. In one of the for ship named as " Medusa" there was 400 passangers and one of them was Schmaltz , this guy was appointed to govern Senegal. In order to arrive Senegal fast he pushed captain to change the route , however that route was dangerous and there were too much rock in the route and the fleet started to follow the problematic route on Arguin

The ship medusa was moving in the dangerous water alone , because he was the fastest ship in the fleet , not surprisingly with the hands of the unskilled captain it , the ship stucked in one of the rocks and it became unusable. They put all the rich people ,wine , water and flour in 6 boats and they builded rafts from the wood they gathered from the ship in order to move the 150 workers too. Obviously there was nothing to make the rafts move , therefore it was tied to the 6 moving boats. This thing went like this fore a while , however when the workers in the raft started to understand their survival chance is quite low they started to jump in to water from the rafts and started to move to boats.

our worst captain De Chaumereys ordered to cut the ties between rafts and boats in order to save the boats and he left them all alone in the middle of the sea. The sailors started to get annoy and the fight between them turns in to suicides and murders. In the following morning there were like 20 losses , the despair , not sleeping enough , crave for water increased each and every day. People were considering themselves lucky each time when they kill someone at night and they even started cannibalism. When Argus arrived after 13 days , there were only 15 guys in the shaft waiting in the edge of instanity and 5 of them dies after the week they found. De Chaumereys is taken to court, but is not found guilty. The portrait Le Radeau de la Méduse which tells this historical event gets donated to the Louvre Museum

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