The Wounded Cuirassier Leaving the Field
Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) · 1814
A cuirassier, one of the heavy cavalrymen of Napoleon's army, has dismounted and is leading his horse down a slope, away from the battle. He grips the reins with one hand and his sabre with the other, glancing back over his shoulder. He wears the steel breastplate and helmet of his corps, and the horse, its eye rolling, resists the descent. Smoke drifts across the background and the light is cold. Nothing tells you where the wound is; his weakness is in the way he leans.
Géricault showed the picture at the Salon of eighteen fourteen, after the fall of the empire, as the companion to the Charging Chasseur of two years earlier, which hangs nearby. Where the officer of eighteen twelve rears upward in a blaze of colour, the cuirassier of eighteen fourteen climbs down in near monochrome, and contemporaries read the pair as a comment on the fate of the Grande Armée. The critics were harsh. After the painter's death the two canvases were sold together at his estate sale in November eighteen twenty four, and the Louvre bought them at public sale in eighteen fifty one.
Did You Know? Géricault painted this huge canvas in a few weeks for the Salon of eighteen fourteen, and the critics disliked it so much that he stopped exhibiting for years.
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