Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A painter of outstanding originality who was considered one of the founders of the French Romantic School, Théodore Géricault left Paris in late 1816, at the age of twenty-five, and spent the next year in Italy, making an extraordinary series of works in a variety of media. This beautiful book studies the work produced by Géricault during this year and assesses the importance of the trip for the rest of his career.

Wheelock Whitney provides the most detailed account to date of the biographical circumstances of the Italian stay, paying particular attention to the artistic milieu in which Géricault found himself in Rome. He assesses Géricault's contact with numerous contemporary artists and in particular the nature of their influence on him-presenting him as a product of his own time and place rather than as a solitary genius. The book discusses and reproduces almost every painting and drawing done by Géricault during this period: his copies after the antique and earlier masters; his works on themes of contemporary Italian genre; the works on mythological and erotic themes; and his paramount Italian project-the series of works on the annual race of riderless horses down the Roman Corso. The book not only sheds light on a hitherto unexamined period of Géricault's life but also illuminates the efforts of a key figure in a transitional period of French art to come to grips with the classical and neoclassical past while embracing the new century's passions for the exotic and the real.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The 25-year-old French painter Theodore Gericault was already a gold medal winner at the 1812 Paris Salon and would soon acquire fame for his 1819 "Raft of the Medusa" when he traveled to Italy in 1816 to experience ancient and Renaissance art. The drawings and paintings from that year-long sojourn are significant because they represent a pivotal point in a major artist's tragically short life‘he died at age 32 of a tubercular spinal infection. This scholarly book analyzes individual examples of Gericault's developing Romantic style by examining thematic and technical influences from the classical and neoclassical past, his contemporary world, and sculpture as well as painting. Art historian Whitney began researching Gericault for a doctoral thesis at the Courtauld Institute. Since he focuses on just one year in Gericault's life, nonspecialists desiring a broader perspective should also have access to Lorenz Eitner's Gericault: His Life and Work (Orbis, 1983). Recommended for academic libraries.‘Anne Marie Lane, American Heritage Ctr., Laramie, Wy. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This volume concentrates on one aspect of the mercurial artistic genius that was the short-lived Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). Twenty years ago Whitney wrote his doctoral thesis for the Courtauld Institute on Gericault's trip to Italy. It is completely updated and lavishly illustrated here, joining an already extensive and important group of publications by many authors covering, but not always stressing, Gericault's 1816-17 Renaissance and classical sojourn in Italy. At the outset, Whitney rightly acknowledges and makes many references to a multitude of writings by the artist's most comprehensive and dominant modern scholar, Lorenz Eitner. Readers also need to seek out several Gericault exhibition catalogs from the 1980s and 1990s, and volume 4 of G. Bazin's Theodore Gericault, etude critique, documents et catalogue raisonne, 6 volumes to date, (Paris, 1987-94). Whitney emphasizes the stylistic importance of Italy to the artist, pointing out his debt to Raphael, Michelangelo, and the antique. Great attention is necessarily given to the sketches for Gericault's aborted project the Race of the Barberi Horses and his mythological and erotic drawings. Whitney states that (with Ingres) Gericault, who died at age 32, was one of the two greatest draftsmen of the early 19th century, and that his work in Italy can be considered "a startlingly original attempt to reinvent rather than reject neoclassicism...." Graduate; faculty. M. Hamel-Schwulst Towson University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Wheelock Whitney is an independent scholar who writes regularly on French nineteenth-century art.