[Illustration:  THE RAFT OF THE “MEDUSA.”  FROM A PAINTING BY GERICAULT IN THE LOUVRE.

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 Andre Theodore Gericault, born at Rouen, September 26, 1791, came to Paris in 1808, and entered the studio of Guerin, where his method of painting displeased his master to such a degree that he advised him to abandon the study of art.  Guerin 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.

Gericault, 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 journals of the time the moving recital of the sufferings of the crew of the frigate “Medusa,” abandoned on a raft in mid-ocean.  Choosing the moment when the fifteen survivors of the hundred and forty-nine men who had embarked on the raft sighted the sail in the offing which meant their deliverance, he worked with an energy and fire which have remained remarkable in the annals of art.  Certain of the figures, all of which are more than life size, were painted in a day, and when the Salon of 1819 opened, the picture was finished.

[Illustration:  INGRES.  FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED BY HIMSELF.

Painted for the gallery of Painters’ Portraits in the Uffizi, Florence, in 1858, according to the inscription on the picture.  This most interesting collection, which is still being added to year by year, comprises the portraits of the great painters, in most cases by their own hands, from the time of the Renaissance to our day.]