Scene of the Flood
Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) · 1806
Lightning splits a stormy sky over a flooded, rocky landscape. A man strains upward on a slippery ledge, gripping a bending branch with one hand while he carries his old father on his back; the old man clutches a bag of money. Below, the man's wife hangs from his other hand, a baby at her breast and a boy clinging to her hair, and the branch is already cracking. The bodies are stretched to their limits and lit by a livid, greenish light. Girodet's subject is not the biblical Deluge but a scene of a flood, a single family caught by rising water, which he invented himself.
The canvas, more than four metres high, was shown at the Salon of 1806 and again in 1814. In 1810 the state's jury awarded it the decennial prize for history painting over David's Sabine Women, a verdict that outraged David's supporters. Louis the Eighteenth bought it in January 1818 together with Girodet's Endymion and Atala, both in this room, for forty thousand francs. Look at the father's bag of gold, the burden that will drag the whole family down; it is Girodet's moral comment on the story.
Did You Know? In 1810 an official jury preferred this picture to David's Sabine Women for the decennial prize, to the fury of David's supporters.
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