How must such a scene have impressed a generation which for long years had seen nothing in the Salon but dry mythology and painted statues! Géricault was the first to free himself from the tyranny of the plaster-of-Paris bust, and once again to put passion and truth to nature in the place of cold marble. Just as he commissioned the ship's carpenter who had constructed the raft and was one of the saved to make him a model of it, so also he moved into a studio close to the hospital, for the purpose of studying the sick and dying, of sketching dead bodies and single limbs. It must be admitted that one would wish for a yet firmer grasp of the subject. In form, Géricault still belongs to the school of David. A good deal of Classicism shows itself in the fact that he thought it necessary to depict the majority of the figures naked, in order to avoid "unpictorial" costumes. There is still something academic in the figures, which do not seem to be sufficiently weakened by privation, disease, and the struggle with death; but what man can free himself at one stroke from the influence of his time and environment? Even in the colouring there lingers some touch of the Classical school. It offends no one, a fact to be insisted on in comparing him with the Nazarenes; but as yet it plays no part in expressing the meaning of the picture. From the distance, indeed, whence the rescuing ship is drawing near, a bright light shines forth upon a scene otherwise depicted in dull brown. Save for this, the intention of the picture is not expressed by means of colour, and it even shows some retrogression as compared with Géricault's earlier works. He had begun with Rubens, yet these studies in colouring did not last. In the "Wounded Cuirassier" of 1814 dark tones took the place of the former cheerfulness, and so in the "Raft of the Medusa" he imagined the tragedy could be represented only in sombre hues. He spread over the whole scene a monotonous unpleasant brown shade, and in his endeavour to lay all weight upon human emotion he went so far as almost to suppress the sea, which nevertheless played the chief part in the drama, and whose deep blue would have afforded a splendid contrast. Discoveries are not to be made all at once, but only when their hour is come. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ EUGÈNE DELACROIX.]