The Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault's monumental depiction of shipwreck and survival — a founding work of French Romanticism.
Painted between 1818 and 1819, when Géricault was in his late twenties, the canvas measures nearly 5 by 7 metres. It portrays the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of Senegal in 1816, leaving some 150 people adrift on a makeshift raft.
Géricault turned a recent political scandal into a timeless image of suffering and hope. He interviewed survivors, studied bodies in the morgue and built a scale model of the raft to compose the pyramidal surge of figures straining toward a distant sail on the horizon.
Exhibited at the Salon of 1819, the work announced the Romantic movement in France and deeply influenced Delacroix. It hangs today in the Denon wing, among the great French paintings of the nineteenth century.
- 🖼️TypeOil on canvas · 490 × 716 cm
- 🎨ArtistThéodore Géricault
- 📅Date1818–1819
- 🏛️RoomDenon wing
- 📍LocationMusée du Louvre, 75001 Paris
About the Louvre
The Louvre is the world’s largest and most-visited art museum. Once the fortress and royal palace of the kings of France, it opened as a public museum in 1793 and today holds some 35,000 works spanning antiquity to the mid-19th century — from Egyptian antiquities and Greek marbles to the French Crown Jewels.
Since 1989, visitors enter beneath the glass Pyramid designed by architect I. M. Pei, which opens onto the museum’s three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — arranged around the Cour Napoléon. The Louvre stands in the 1st arrondissement along the Rue de Rivoli, beside the Tuileries Gardens and the Seine.
The museum is open every day except Tuesday, from 9 am to 6 pm (with a late evening on Fridays). Timed tickets are strongly recommended and can be booked on the official site, louvre.fr; under-18s enter free, as do EU residents under 26. Nearest métro: Palais-Royal–Musée du Louvre (lines 1 and 7).
Where to see it — the Louvre and around
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