Painted Accident: Géricault’s Dead Cat

The French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault is best known for his history painting, The Raft of the Medusa (1819), which takes an unsparing look at bodies hanging between life and death, adrift at sea. This article examines Géricault’s exploration of a very different kind of death, that of a single feline perhaps known to the artist, which resulted in a singular painting with an ambiguously defined genre. I argue that Géricault’s study of the dead cat should be viewed as an attempt to memorialize a specific individual feline in a specific time and place, and that the process of painting allowed Géricault to explore death in a way that stood apart from the more grisly explorations that he undertook as part of his preparation for the Raft of the Medusa.