ABSTRACT
The Theodore Gericault myth is familiar, and the painter became a key contributor to the mythology of the Romantic artist: passionate, troubled genius, ahead of his times, his life, like those of his British contemporaries John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, or G. G. Byron, cut tragically short. Jean-Louis-Andre-Gericault belonged to a generation that was almost but not quite too young to participate in the Napoleonic adventure. H. Vernet was fascinated by English sporting art, and no doubt Gericault's passion for horses was stimulated by his experience at the studio, particularly through his friendship with Vernet's son Horace. If Gericault had military dreams of his own, they were perhaps, like Stendhal's Fabrice von Dongen's in The Charterhouse of Parma, "fed on showmanship and mirages". In the social and political climate of the Empire a young artist of Gericault's education and disposition could hardly fail to be aware of art's relationship to the rest of society, and to want somehow to develop it.
