Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
The Passions of Géricault
By Henri Zerner
Géricault: His Life and Work
by Lorenz E.A. Eitner
Cornell University Press, 376 pp., $85.00
Géricault was passionate about horses, passionate about art, passionate by temperament. He was the archetypal Romantic artist not only in his work, but also in his life. Three years younger than Byron, he died in the same year, 1824, after a feverish life. Like Byron he had a desperate and scandalous love affair with a near relative, and the result, as in Byron's case, was an illegitimate child. Géricault's lover, the young wife of his uncle, had to be smuggled off to a country house and hidden there. Géricault remains fascinating today. In 1974 an anonymous donor gave the Guggenheim Museum a drawing by William Baziotes 'in memory of the beautiful and tormented Géricault.'
Review, 3824 words
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