My artist is Théodore Gericault he was from a wealthy family and started making art at the age of fifteen when his family move to Paris. His family was very wealthy with his dad being a lawyer and his mom side of the family having tobacco plantations. For art Géricault trained with Pierre Bouillon and Carle Vernet before joining the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. He loved drawing horses and got into fights with other students, he was expelled from school after he hurt one of his professors dropping a bucket of water on his head. He went on and did many things like joining the Third Brigade of the First Company of the Royal Musketeers for about a year. Then went along to do other things in art. He fits into this gallery because his later work brings out the fact that people aren'r forever and after some time we'll just disappear.

  

Théodore Gericault created the raft of the méduse after the July 2nd méduse shipwreck incident he moved to the coast and he studied everything; the skies, the bodies and interviewed the survivors, he also studied corps and decomposed bodies. He developed a close relationship with the hospital near there and was able to get more of an insight of all that had happened. He moved to London where he was well recognized and enjoyed being praised. This drawing was so controversial because no artist before had ever done something like this and this shipwreck had scandalous political implications at home because the captain, who had got his position because of connections to the Bourbon Restoration Government, he fought to save himself and senior officers while leaving the lower ranks to die so the picture of the raft and its inhabitants was greeted with hostility by the French government. Bringing the dead into painting making them look as good and very dramatic shock lots of people at that time too. Because of that painting he did other pieces like The Anatomical Piece, The Severed Heads and Head of a Drowned Man along with other.  

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The Severed heads was one of the many pieces Théodore Gericault did before completing the Raft of the Medusa to have practice and perfect his masterpiece. He was very interested with mental illness, death, and violence and he used those subjects to push the boundaries of his artistic expression. He would go check out parts of a person's dead body to study and see as they decomposed. This wasn’t very common then or now unless you are a doctor/researcher so this guy must have been a little crazy. He did this with four different heads and did three paintings. You can see that he painted this painting with the most detail because it was part of the Realism movement. 

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Anatomical Pieces was created in 1818 this painting too was in order to perfect his later masterpiece that he would be recognized afterwards for. This drawing was made to let people know that after death you are nothing your body could be played with discarded and become oblivion in this world. Death is something that scares most people and Théodore Gericault brought it to life like nothing bringing a shock to us. The placing of the body parts have been carefully thought through to focus our attention on the twisted body parts, half hidden by shadow.  Showing us different angles and viewpoints of the bodies remains. 

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