Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Géricault

Pierre-Jean David, called David d'Angers (1788-1856), Paris (according to an inscription on the old mount);

with Prouté, Paris;

with Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Ltd., London, Nineteenth Century French Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1979, cat. no. 6;

sale, London, Christie's, 7 July 2010, lot 365;

sale, Paris, Sotheby's, "Traits Et Portraits : Une Collection Particulière", 28 March 2019, lot 107

Wiesbaden, Museum Wiesbaden, Delacroix - Courbet - Ribot, Positionen französischer Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2017-8, no. 8a & 8b

G. Bazin, Théodore Géricault: étude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1987, II, pp. 282, 416, no. 277, reproduced

As previously noted by Germain Bazin (loc. cit.), this study of a prostrate young man, supported by a lightly-sketched figure behind, belongs among the studies of figures and compositions after the Antique, which Géricault is thought to have executed around 1815-17. It is, however, important to note that the pose of the figure is remarkably similar to that of the dead youth embraced by his father, depicted in the foreground of Géricault's masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, a painting of significant importance that was acquired for the collection of the Louvre from Gericault's posthumous sale in 1824. The present drawing may be one of the many anatomical studies that Géricault made at the Beaujon Hospital while preparing his picture.

See also lot 171.