Which French painter created 'The Raft of the Medusa'?

The French painter who created The Raft of the Medusa was Théodore Géricault.

Géricault painted the monumental oil-on-canvas work in 1818–1819, when he was 27. It depicts survivors of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of present-day Mauritania in 1816. At least 150 people were abandoned on a makeshift raft; only 15 survived the 13 days before rescue. Reports of starvation, dehydration, and cannibalism turned the disaster into an international scandal.

Rather than painting a mythological or ancient subject, Géricault chose a recent political tragedy. He interviewed survivors, studied bodies in hospitals and morgues, and constructed a model of the raft to pursue unsettling realism. The painting’s dramatic scale and turbulent emotion helped establish French Romanticism while challenging the calm order associated with Neoclassicism.

A common mix-up is Eugène Delacroix, who was a contemporary of Géricault and posed for one of the figures in the painting. Delacroix was strongly influenced by the work, but he did not create it. The painting is now one of the Louvre’s best-known masterpieces.