This sketchbook, which was originally in the prestigious Coutan-Hauguet Collection, is one of the only four albums by Géricault that have survived to this day. Its authenticity is well attested by its provenance, by the notes that Géricault wrote on its cover and on its pages, and by his signature, which appears in the upper section of one of the folios. This album, which was published for the first time in 1987 by Germain Bazin, provides precious insights into the artist’s early work as he trained to become an artist between 1808 and 1810.
After a mediocre experience as a student at the Lycée Impérial, Géricault left the institution at the end of the 1807 - 1808 school year to pursue his ambition to become a painter. However, since his artistic aspirations did not find favour with his father, the young Géricault joined the tobacco company of his maternal uncle, Jean-Baptiste Caruel, and started to train as a bookkeeper. This apprenticeship enabled him to attend the courses led by Carle Vernet, an artist who specialised in the depiction of genre scenes and horses. Our carnet de dessins, the oldest known by Géricault, is, in fact, an accounting register: one can clearly discern the red columns that were meant to facilitate the writing of sums followed by decimals. The label glued to the inner part of the upper cover indicates that the sketchbook was bought at a stationery store, the Maison Millot, located at 92 rue Saint-Jacques in Paris in 1808 according to the information that has come down to us in the Almanach du Commerce. Géricault, probably with the support of his uncle, used one of the Millot registers from the tobacco company to experiment with his pencils. The spontaneity that characterises the creative approach of the young Géricault is palpable in our sketchbook, on which he drew in all directions, often leaving some pages untouched. His handwritten notes reveal the artist’s objectives and thoughts as he they evolved daily: “ italian german english ”, “ ask for a violin ”, “ les folies d’Espagne ”, “ light infantry combats ”, and “ mould with wax what I will have to do ”, appear on the verso of folio 44 (p. 96), while the notes “make from nature”, “model”, and “make portraits” were written on its recto (p. 95). These notes are not merely artistic in nature.
Since his adolescence – the artist being only seventeen years old when he started drawing in this sketchbook – Géricault had a kaleidoscopic range of interests. His notes testify to his efforts to read foreign literature in its original language and to his passion for music. As Louis Batissier put it, “ Géricault had a charming voice and he composed melodies that he could sing with infinite taste ”. The reference to the light infantry suggests the artist’s interest in national history and contemporary politics: the spectacle of military life at the height of the Empire seems to have fascinated him. If the inscriptions “ model ” and “ mould with wax what I will have to do ” might seem surprising, since Géricault never had the ambition of becoming a sculptor, they provide insights into the method employed by the artist as he started drawing. Like many major artists before him, namely Nicolas Poussin, Géricault formulated his compositions by casting models of his figures before drawing them. Ultimately, this method facilitated the creation of one of his majors works, the Raft of the Medusa, between 1819 and 1820.
The Louvre’s Zoubaloff sketchbook, which also dates from the training period of the artist, mainly displays Géricault’s early copies of antiquities and masterpieces by both old and modern masters. Our carnet de dessins, however, is mostly constituted by studies of horses. Nonetheless, it also offers representations of deer, boars, and dogs in the wild as he would have encountered them on a hunting session (p. 87), as well as pen sketches of theatrical costumes and of elements of the human body: heads, eyes, hands, and finger, likely those of the artist himself (p. 48). As for the portraits that he reminded himself to draw in his notes, we can only find one on the recto of folio 6 (p. 19). According to Bazin, this portrait, which Gericault vigorously crossed out, could be a self-portrait, and hence a manifestation of the artist’s distress as a young adult. This sentiment is similarly suggested by one of his notes reading “ unhappy ”. The bold head of an elderly man with a “ saw-tooth profile, a pointed chin and pursed lips ”1, appears repeatedly throughout the album as to create a grotesque leitmotif.
The Carnet is otherwise filled with nervous, leaping, whinnying horses. These beasts that seem to fly away quivering and kicking are always drawn free and in motion. According to Charles Clément, Géricault’s “ dominant passion was the horse; as soon as he could, he would run off to lock himself up in a stable with his pencils, where he remained for days on end ”. Of the horse, nothing escaped him. He studied in detail all the parts of their bodies, the heads, the eyes, and the limbs, and, on one of his drawings, he even offered scrupulous instructions on how to “ construct ” a mock-up horse: “ iron wire, skin cotton thread ”, “ the eyes and the hooves in wood ” (p. 63). In our album, the sketches of horses drawn with pencil and graphite seem to contrast with the compositions rendered with India ink wash and red chalk displaying a synthesis of his observations of groups of horses (p. 85). While the pencil and pen sketches illustrate the artist’s precocious technical prowess, the wash drawings, in which Géricault tried to " paint ", have a more youthful character that reveals Géricault’s ambition to experiment with different media and different shades of colour to intensify the dynamism of his scenes.
In 1808, Géricault had not yet started painting. None of these drawings could, therefore, be associated with a known painting by the master. Nonetheless, these sketches crystallise the observations and the early artistic experiments of the young artist, ultimately laying the foundations of his later work. Thus, the drawing of a horse in profile in a stable (p. 82) seems to foretell the many watercolours and lithographs of horses in a stable that Géricault painted later in his career. Similarly, his representation of a galloping horse (p. 84) evokes his famous painting The 1821 Derby at Epsom. This notebook, which is an album of drawings as much as it is a diary, is a rare and precious collection of thoughts and feelings which testifies to the precocious talent of one of the most innovative French artists of the 19th century.