The sculpture of painter Theodore Gericault with palette and brushes on his tomb at Pere-Lachaise

The funerary monument of Jean-Louis Andre Theodore Gericault, French painter considered the precursor of Romanticism in painting. The sculpture by Antoine Etex depicts him semi-reclined on the sarcophagus, dressed in painter's clothes and with the tools of his trade: the palette in his left hand and brush in his right. Gericault is famous above all for "The Raft of the Medusa" (1819), a masterpiece that scandalized France for its denunciation of a shipwreck caused by royal navy incompetence. He died at just 32, in 1824, from the consequences of a horse fall, an animal he loved to portray.

Theodore Gericault, grave, painter, Pere-Lachaise, Romanticism, Raft Medusa