Portrait of the Carpenter of The Medusa

French artist Théodore Géricault painted this portrait as part of his exhaustive research for "The Raft of the Medusa." The subject is Lavillette, the ship's carpenter who survived the 1816 Medusa disaster. He was one of only fifteen people who lived through the horrific thirteen days adrift on the makeshift raft.

Géricault brought Lavillette to his studio and commissioned him to build a scale model of the raft. This allowed the artist to study the structure's perspective and construction details for his monumental painting. The Romantic painter spent two years interviewing survivors, visiting morgues, and studying corpses to achieve the brutal realism of his work. This portrait captures one of the ordinary men whose harrowing tale would shock France and expose government negligence.