Step into a locked Paris studio in 1818 and you would smell death before you saw the canvas. A 27-year-old painter with a shaved head demanded absolute silence from his teenage assistant, kept severed limbs from hospital morgues as reference material, and left a decapitated head from a local asylum on the roof to study decay. This episode follows Theodore Gericault as he turned a national scandal into a monumental painting. We begin with the 1816 wreck of the frigate Meduse, run aground off West Africa by an inexperienced royalist captain, and the 150 people abandoned on a makeshift raft when the officers in the lifeboats cut the tow ropes. After 13 days of mutiny, murder, and cannibalism, only 15 survived.

Gericault chose to self-fund a painting of this politically explosive subject rather than wait for a safe commission. He interviewed survivors, hired the ship’s carpenter to build a scale model of the raft, and bribed hospital workers for body parts. We examine the canvas itself, roughly 16 by 23 feet with figures at twice life size, painted one finished figure at a time with a bitumen pigment that has darkened over the centuries. We also look at his choice to place a Black man at the apex of the composition, the mixed reception at the 1819 Salon, the king’s pointed remark that the shipwreck was no disaster, and the London exhibition that finally paid him.

• How nepotism under the restored monarchy put a captain who had not sailed in 20 years in charge of the Meduse
• Why Gericault’s neoclassical training led him to paint muscular, heroic bodies despite months studying starvation and decay
• The personal collapse behind his isolation, including a forbidden affair and a shaved head to keep himself indoors
• How William Bullock’s 1820 show at the Egyptian Hall drew around 40,000 paying visitors and earned Gericault roughly 20,000 francs
• The young Delacroix who modeled for a corpse and ran through the streets after seeing the finished work