Venus and Cupid in a Landscape, after Annibale Carracci (recto); A Warrior Holding a Shield and Sword, Seen from the Back (verso)

Théodore Gericault French
 After Annibale Carracci Italian

Not on view


Géricault left the studio of Pierre Narcisse Guérin after only six months, impatient with the imposed structure and preferring to work independently, making copies after old masters in the Louvre and antiquities in Rome. His life was cut short by illness, and he left behind only a handful of great masterpieces.

This drawing of an ancient warrior straddling his defeated enemy recalls similar figures in the work of Jacques Louis David, whom Géricault visited in Brussels in 1820. The addition of the varied intensities of blue wash, however, gives the sheet a pictorial quality rarely seen in the elder artist’s graphic oeuvre.

Venus and Cupid in a Landscape, after Annibale Carracci (recto); A Warrior Holding a Shield and Sword, Seen from the Back (verso), Théodore Gericault (French, Rouen 1791–1824 Paris), (r.) Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, watercolor, and white gouache over graphite and traces of red chalk; (v.) Pen and brown ink and watercolor over graphite and traces of red chalk

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Venus and Cupid in a Landscape, after Annibale Carracci (recto); A Warrior Holding a Shield and Sword, Seen from the Back (verso), Théodore Gericault (French, Rouen 1791–1824 Paris), (r.) Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, watercolor, and white gouache over graphite and traces of red chalk; (v.) Pen and brown ink and watercolor over graphite and traces of red chalk
Venus and Cupid in a Landscape, after Annibale Carracci (recto); A Warrior Holding a Shield and Sword, Seen from the Back (verso), Théodore Gericault (French, Rouen 1791–1824 Paris), (r.) Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, watercolor, and white gouache over graphite and traces of red chalk; (v.) Pen and brown ink and watercolor over graphite and traces of red chalk

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