The Raft

In 1819 the young French artist Théodore Géricault exhibited his painting The Raft of the Medusa at the annual Paris Salon. The huge canvas measured 5m x 7m and had taken him eight months to complete.

The Medusa was a French naval frigate which set out on a poorly planned expedition to Senegal in 1816. When it ran onto a reef off the coast of West Africa, the crew were forced to abandon ship. There were only four boats on the Medusa, so a raft was hurriedly built which the boats were to tow to safety. A hundred and fifty soldiers, sailors and passengers crowded on board. Their weight was so great that the raft immediately sank a metre below the surface of the water, spoiling most of the provisions. The sailors rowing the boats soon became tired of towing the raft, and one by one the ropes were cut, leaving those on the raft to their fate. On the first two nights the raft was buffeted by terrible storms, and those clinging to it lost all hope of rescue. Some drank from a cask of wine that was contaminated with seawater and in a frenzied delirium began to hack at the ropes binding the timbers of the raft. The officers tried to stop them and thus began the first of several pitched battles on the raft which cost many lives. Most of the survivors of the fighting had been injured, and once order was restored they found themselves faced with death from thirst or starvation. As their number dwindled, the badly wounded were thrown overboard to conserve what provisions remained, and the living resorted to eating the dead. When a passing ship finally found the raft after thirteen days adrift only fifteen men remained.

Géricault’s painting caused something of a political sensation. It had been the privileged members of the Medusa expedition who had taken to the ship’s boats, whilst the more lowly were abandoned on the raft. For many people this was a perfect metaphor for the corruption of the royalist regime that had been recently restored in France after the fall of Napoleon. On top of this, the French Government was seriously embarrassed internationally by the obvious naval incompetence that had led to the tragedy. The political context is now long forgotten, and yet the painting remains one of the most powerful images in all art, for beyond its contemporary significance it seems to address the wider theme of the human predicament.

The miniature rafts started as a one-off request from fellow artist Stephanie Goodger for a 3-D realisation of The Raft of the Medusa that might be used in an animation. Stephanie was working on a series of paintings taking up themes from the French Romantic period, including The Raft of the Medusa.

I am particularly interested in the use of repetition and variation, and from one raft the project rapidly expanded to making fifteen. The figures on Gericault’s raft embody a whole gamut of human emotions from hope to despair, and the raft itself can be seen as a kind of stage on which this drama is played out. Once I began to think of the raft as a kind of theatre it was clear that it could become the setting for any number of little scenarios. I decided to limit these to fifteen, which is the number of survivors on the raft, and each miniature bears one of their names.