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     Jean Louis Andre Theodore Gericault was a French painter during the Romantic Era.  Born into a wealthy Rouen family, he was fortunate to study under great painters such as Carle Vernet and Pierre Guerin.  The works of the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo and the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens greatly influenced Gericault’s paintings.  Some of Gericault’s work consists of the Charging Chasseur (1812, Musee du Louvre), Wounded Cuirassier (1814, Musee du Louvre), and the beautiful Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819, Musee du Louvre).
    These paintings showed Gericault’s talent to portray powerful emotion, brutal actions, bold design, and dramatic color.  The Raft of the Medusa was a symbol portraying the dying survivors of a contemporary shipwreck, and it soulfully depicted human agony, graphic details, and controversy over the French government.  This canvas also aroused a storm of controversy between neoclassical and romantic artists.  Among his other works, Theodore Gericault’s talent led him to create a number of bronze statuettes, a marvelous series of lithographs, and hundreds of drawings and color sketches.

    The Romantic Era began in the early 1800s and ended in 1850.  This era is characterized as being highly imaginative and having a subjective approach, emotional intensity, and dreamlike qualities.  In the 18th Century, Romanticism was taken to mean “romance like.”  This word began to be associated with wild scenery.  In France, the word became popular within the Napoleonic Wars that raged from 1799 to 1815.
    The first painters in the Romantic Era found inspiration in contemporary events.  Many other painters emphasized their works upon human conditions especially Theodore Gericault, who painted The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819).  In Germany, there was a school that was built using symbolic landscape, which was initiated, by the paintings of Phillip Otto Runge.  The greatest German Romantic painter was Caspar David Friedrich.  One of his most important paintings was The Polar Sea, which was painted in 1824.
    In England, Samuel Palmer painted visionary religious feelings, which were derived by Blake.  The artist with the most radical vision was J.M.W. Turner. He used luminous colors and bold, thick brushwork.  In the United States, there was a school founded by the inspiration drawn from the wilderness of the northeastern United States.  It was called the Hudson River School.  The first American landscapist and Romantic painter was Washington Allston who introduced the style of the Romantics to the United States by using poetic landscapes with subjective feeling. His paintings were mysterious, brooding, and inspired by the bible, poetry, and novels.
    Subjectivity, imagination, strange, and dreamlike imagery have influenced Romantic artists.  The Romantics had a taste for medieval and mysterious nature.  Many painters liked colorful and painterly techniques over linear and cool toned styles.  Theodore Gericault was known for his dramatic interpretation of a real event.  One of these paintings was called the Raft of the Medusa, which had to do with suffering of survivors of a shipwreck.  His painting deeply impressed Eugene Delacroix in which he pursued in a painting called the Massacre at Chios.  Romanticism was very dominant during the 19th century but many painters worked outside the main tradition.