The Charging Chasseur

Théodore Géricault painted The Charging Chasseur in 1812, his debut at the Paris Salon at just twenty-one years old. The enormous canvas, measuring 349 by 266 centimeters, shows an officer of Napoleon's Imperial Horse Guards on a rearing mount, saber drawn, twisting toward an unseen enemy. The chasseurs were the elite of French cavalry, tasked with protecting the Emperor himself. Géricault intended the painting as a tribute to French military glory at the height of Napoleon's empire.

The composition borrows from Rubens and echoes Jacques-Louis David's famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps, but Géricault's handling is far more visceral. The paint is applied with aggressive energy, the diagonal arrangement creates dramatic instability, and the horse appears to rear away from danger rather than charge toward victory. The work won a gold medal, but within two years, Napoleon's empire had collapsed. At the 1814 Salon, Géricault exhibited it alongside a pendant piece, The Wounded Cuirassier, showing a defeated soldier retreating from battle.

The subject was actually Géricault's friend Alexandre Dieudonne, though the original title concealed his identity. The painting now hangs in the Louvre, an early defining work of French Romanticism that announced a major new talent to the art world.