The Raft

The Raft, painted in 1807, was created in the same year that Géricault was in Rome beginning his Italian studies, more than a decade before the Frenchman would paint The Raft of the Medusa in 1818 and 1819. Turner's small-scale treatment of figures adrift at sea precedes Géricault's monumental statement of maritime disaster and human endurance, and the two works demonstrate how a shared Romantic preoccupation with the human figure overwhelmed by the sea produced radically different pictorial solutions: Géricault's pyramidal, sculptural group of dying and dead, evoking antique history painting; Turner's more atmospheric dissolution of the raft into the surrounding indifferent sea. Whether Turner knew the actual incident that inspired his painting or was working from a general fascination with maritime vulnerability is uncertain, but his treatment of the subject — the raft and its occupants barely holding against the sea's vast indifference — is among his most emotionally concentrated small-scale works of the period.

Turner renders the raft and its desperate occupants against a vast, indifferent sea, using dramatic tonal contrasts and the isolation of the tiny vessel to convey the overwhelming scale of the ocean.