The life of Ivan Stepanovitch Mazeppa, a 17th century courtier and spy who worked for the Polish king Ivan Kasimir, was transformed into legend and made famous by writers as diverse as Voltaire and Lord Byron, Victor Hugo and Alexander Pushkin. Mazeppa was exiled to his home in the Ukraine following an incident in which the King was disgraced but he, the page, took the blame and it appears that a rival courtier invented the incident which was to appeal so strongly to the imaginations of 18th and 19th century writers and artists. According to the invented tale, Mazeppa is said to have seduced the wife of a Polish nobleman; the latter on discovering the betrayal caused Mazeppa to be stripped and tied to the back of a wild horse. Voltaire has him being carried back, half dead, to his homeland, to which the horse was also native and there tended by peasants until strong enough to ride again himself.  Byron transformed this histrionic story into poetry in 1818, whilst resident in Venice. The poem was published in London in 1819 and translated into French in 1822. Most probably, Géricault encountered the text at this point, having just returned to France following a year-long stay in England. The theme clearly struck the artist deeply, the combination of an unstoppable horse, a naked, tormented man and an illicit love story being irresistibly inspiring to Géricault, fixated with horses and himself suffering for passion.

One of his first biographers, Charles Blanc, noted the existence of a number of studies for a Mazeppa in the collections of a M. Marcille1  and Charles Clément, the earliest cataloguer of Gericault’s works, in 1868 lists a small painting of  Mazeppa in the collection of A. M. de Triqueti, depicting the horse struggling to climb out of a river with Mazeppa tied to his back, his head resting on the horse’s neck; a drawing (135 x 216mm.) in the collection of A.M de Boutteville showing the horse and Mazeppa himself lying dead or dying and a number of lithographs2. A second painting emerged in 1924 at the time of a retrospective held to commemorate the centenary of the artist’s death, a Mazeppa, again small, which was included in the sale of the Saulnier collection in 1886 and belonged to R. Getz in 19233.  Various further studies of Mazeppa are recorded in four sale catalogues covering the period from 1869 to 1912 and the many volumed catalogue raisonné by Germain Bazin included in vol.VII, an illustration of a tracing by Alexander Colin recording various drawings by Géricault on the theme of dying figures, including a Mazeppa bound to the horse, similarly posed as in the present work but precisely comparable to a recently exhibited drawing by Géricault in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, also said to have come from the collection of M. Marcille4 The present study is drawn in a very similar way to the one in Geneva but shows the figure from the opposite angle, the outline of the dead horse being secondary to that of the outstretched form of the naked Mazeppa. Philippe Grunchec, author of a catalogue of Géricault’s drawings and watercolours on the theme of the horse, suggests that Géricault felt a strong link with Mazeppa’s plight through his own liason with the wife of his uncle. Grunchec also records the suggestion of Alfred Baudry, a contemporary of Charles Clément and curator of the museum at Rouen, that there was a form of competition to depict the theme between Géricault and his friend Horace Vernet, this idea being based on what might be another invented story, that of a collector from Rouen, who owned one of the studies of Mazeppa and described it as having been made by Géricault in response to a discussion of Vernet’s version which he, Géricault, is said to have decried as feeble, at once demonstrating his own more expressive composition by drawing it there and then5. This explanation could well be apocryphal as all the dated examples of Vernet’s paintings of Mazeppa post-date Géricault’s tragically early death.  

It may be imagined from the amount of surviving work, that Géricault planned to execute a larger painting of Mazeppa and that he was perhaps considering illustrations for an edition of the poem; a single lithograph survives made in collaboration with Eugène Lami and showing the same scene as the two paintings with the horse struggling to climb on to a riverback. The moment depicted in the present work, and in the drawing at Geneva, occurs later in the poem, when the horse has finally collapsed and Mazeppa lies with head outstretched, one leg trapped beneath the horse’s flank and an arm bent back onto the ground. He lies unconscious, his mouth slightly open, exhausted and vulnerable, the fineness of the execution of this work suggesting that Géricault found particular fascination in the depiction of his hero’s extended body.  It may be worthy of consideration that the spring of 1822, the year the French translation of Byron’s poem was published, seems to have been made particularly difficult for Géricault as a result of three riding accidents which he suffered, one of which occurred whilst he was racing through Montmatre with Horace Vernet and which was to cause the eventually fatal inflammation to his back6.
 
This drawing will be included in Bruno Chenique’s forthcoming Catalogue raisonné des dessins inédits et retrouvés de Théodore Géricault.


1.    ‘plusieurs etudes pour un Mazeppa, Charles Blanc, Géricault, ‘Histoire des peintres français au dix-neuvième siècle’, vol.I, Paris 1845, p.440.
2.    Charles Clément, Géricault. Etude biographique et critique avec le catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre du maître, originally published 1868, third edition 1879, pp. 316, 365, 406.
3.    Exhibition catalogue, Exposition d’oeuvres de Géricault au profit de la Société ‘ La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français, Paris, Hôtel Jean Charpentier, 1924.
4.    See exhibition catalogue, Dessins français, Collection du Cabinet des dessins du Musée d’art et d’historie de Genève,  Geneva 2004-5, illus. p.104-5.
5.    Philippe Grunchec, Géricault. Dessins et Aquarelles de Chevaux, Lausanne, Paris, 1982, pp.10-11.
6.    See, exhibition catalogue,  Gericault,  Paris, Grand Palais, 1991-1992, pp.298-299.