Scene from the Epidemic of Yellow Fever in Cadiz

The yellow fever epidemic in Cadiz in 1819 was a significant public health catastrophe that killed thousands and prompted European-wide discussion about contagion, quarantine, and the vulnerability of urban populations to epidemic disease. Géricault's engagement with this subject in the same year as the Raft of the Medusa reveals the consistency of his preoccupations: mass death, bodies in extremity, and the indifference of fate to human dignity. The depiction of epidemic disease had precedents in paintings of the plague — from Poussin's plague of Ashdod to Gros's famous 'Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa' (1804) — and Géricault was clearly working within and against this tradition. Where Gros's Napoleon touched the plague victims in a gesture of heroic compassion, Géricault's treatment of epidemic scenes tends to remove the redemptive heroic figure, leaving only suffering and death. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts holds this work as part of its European Romantic collection.

Epidemic scenes require the management of multiple figures in states of physical collapse across a spatial setting suggesting both confinement and exposure. Géricault likely organizes the composition through strong tonal contrasts between dying figures lit against dark interiors or oppressive open spaces.