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From La Méduse to the Titanic: Géricault’s raft in journalistic illustration up to 1912

Research imperatives and process: This article discusses episodes in the social life of a work of art, Gericault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’, as its formal schema and narrativity was recycled in the hands of periodical publishers, illustrators and artists to report maritime disasters over the long nineteenth century. It focuses on the practices of journalistic illustration in nineteenth-century weekly illustrated magazines such as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. It concentrates on the period after 1880, ending with a discussion of the presence of ‘The Raft’ in reports of the Titanic’s sinking. Drawing on an extensive archive of popular magazines, it identifies some of the ways in which journalistic illustrators of the end of the Titanic used Gericault’s schema as a way at once of fabricating and of adding resonance to their supposedly reportorial pictures.