| In a field largely dependent upon a very limited body of documentary evidence, the Louvre's Zoubaloff sketchbook provides an unusually complete and coherent illustration of a short, pivotal period in Gericault's development when two apparently contradictory styles and thematic interests overlap. Based on the chronological sequence of the two sets of drawings contained within its covers, the Carnet Zoubaloff offers the important revelation that the direction of Gericault's early development was precisely the opposite of that which earlier historians had suggested. Strong, irrefutable evidence which dates the two portions of the sketchbook, makes it quite clear that the fluent, progressively modern drawings of the carnet's second half mark an early stage in Gericault's development, while the labored, seemingly retrograde classicist exercises of its opening pages--strikingly lacking the originality of the modern drawings--represent a later phase and are the prelude to an entirely new development in Gericault's work. Temporarily abandoning modern interests, Gericault began in 1814 to forge a new style of great expressive power and grandly monumental force by returning to the classicist lessons that he had spurned while a youth. A full understanding of Gericault's entire oeuvre thus becomes possible only when the strange pattern of his early development is taken into account: the impulsive, head-long leap into modern subjects and visual realism around 1812, followed by the suppression of these more natural tendencies through a highly-structured, vigorous regimen of self-imposed discipline, which ultimately led to the development of a more expressive, personal style. The Zoubaloff sketchbook, whose complete contents have yet to be the subject of detailed study, is the one document that traces this development in its entirety and in all its complexity; it provides the nucleus around which the chronology of Gericault's work before 1817 can be organized. |
