The frigate "Medusa," accompanied by three other vessels, left France
June 17, 1816, heading for Saint-Louis (Senegal), with the governor
and principal officers of the colony as passengers. On July 2 the
vessel stranded on a reef, and after five days of ineffectual effort
to float her, was abandoned. A raft was constructed and one hundred
and forty-nine men embarked on it, the remainder of the crew and
passengers, four hundred all told, taking to the boats. For twelve
days, the raft floated at the will of the waves and winds; then it
was sighted by one of the convoys, the brig Argus. Only fifteen men
survived. The picture represents the moment of their deliverance.]

Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault, born at Rouen, September 26,
1791, came to Paris in 1808, and entered the studio of Guérin, where
his method of painting displeased his master to such a degree that he
advised him to abandon the study of art. Guérin had thoroughly imbibed
the defects of the David method; and the spectacle of a youth who
obstinately persisted in trying to paint the model as he really
appeared, instead of making a pink imitation of antique sculpture,
seemed to him to be of little promise.

Géricault, however, persisted; and with the exception of about a year,
when the halo of military glory seduced him from his work, he worked
so well and earnestly that, after two years' sojourn in Italy, he
returned to Paris, a few weeks before the Salon of 1819, equipped with
the knowledge of a master.

Taking a canvas about fifteen feet high by twenty in length, using the
green-room of a theatre for a studio, he set to work. Disdaining the
prevailing taste for mythology and classic themes, he took from the