Theodore Gericault was a pretty kickin' dude. He was a Romanticist, which means his paintings automatically surpassed whatever the Impressionists came up with (Water Lilies? Psh.) Gericault's best painting (and actually the only one anybody knows about) was The Raft of the Medusa. It's hanging in the Louvre right now, and here's the scoop.

After they had kicked Napoleon out of France for good, the powers that be of France got Britain to give them a port in Senegal (which is in Africa). So, they sent four boats with some people to pick up the change of title form from the Brits. One of the boats was called the Medusa and that's the one that most of the people rode on. Unfortunately, the captain was a guy named Frigate-Captain Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys. In addition to having an annoyingly long name, he was twenty years out of practice as a sailor.

So when the Medusa got ahead of everybody and oopsy ran aground in shallow water, the inexperienced de Chaum-whatever put all the "important" people on the lifeboats and built a raft out of the ship for the 149 men and one woman who weren't important enough to get a lifeboat. Seventeen dummies stayed on the Medusa. They were probably watching the Super Bowl.

Anyway, the lifeboats were towing the raft when the important people decided they'd go faster if they let the raft go. They cut the ropes, and things on the raft quickly degenerated. A food fight of wine and flour (odd things to have together for provisions on a raft) erupted. Eight days into it, the guys who were still healthy threw the unfit off the raft. Five days after that, one of the other four ships (the Argus, for everyone keeping tabs) somehow saw the raft. Five of the fifteen guys still on it died shortly after returning to France. Three of the guys who were watching the Super Bowl on the Medusa survived.

The hunger of not having food probably made the people on the raft a little bit crazy. That's why I decided to change the painting; my guess is that the guys in front were reaching for a hallucinated can of refreshing Mountain Dew with which to quench their thirst(s?). Also, Gericault has seventeen people in his painting. I figure the guy hanging off the raft by his legs in the bottom right corner and the guy underneath the guy in the Thinker pose on the left were the two who didn't survive in time to get rescued.

Interestingly enough, Gericault only lived to be 32 years of age.