“French painter, draughtsman, lithographer and sculptor. He experienced the exaltation of Napolean’s triumphs in his boyhood, reached maturity at the time of the empire’s agony and ended his career of little more than twelve working years in the troubled early period of the Restoration. When he died he was known to the public only by the three paintings he had exhibited at the Salon in Paris, the Charging Chasseur, the Wounded Cuirassier Leaving the Field of Battle, and the Raft of Medusa, and by a handful of lithographs.
The work that Gericault left behind is a fragment, difficult to comprehend or fit into the conventional framework of art history. Primarily he sought a pictorial form with which to represent contemporary experience with dramatic emphasis and visual truth. The dangers that beset him on his search were, on the one side, the stylelessness and banality of “picturesque” realism and, on the other, the stilted artifice of over stylization. Between these two temptations, the Romantic and the Neo-classical, he sought for a middle way: a grand style capable of expressing modern subjects.”

(Biographical source: Turner, Jane, ed. The Dictionary of Art. New York: Macmillan Limited, 1996.)