Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the the Art of Being Lost at Sea, by Tom de Freston Mark Bostridge

dear”’, in the words of Louis MacNeice, and the beer-swilling, sporty hearties.

It is easy to see into which camp Dodds, Murray and Bowra fell – although never exclusively – or, indeed, where Dunn’s sympathies lie. The story ends in the 1930s, with the vain Oxonian attempts at appeasement, as the ‘low, dishonest decade’ crumbles away into antiquity.

If this makes it sound downbeat, then rest assured that this is a witty and deeply researched book. It is full of revelations. Dunn finds the source of the tale of Hitler greeting Bob Boothby with ‘Heil Hitler’ and Boothby replying, ‘Heil Boothby.’ Maurice Bowra told the story; not Boothby himself.

Dunn has an eye for trivia. We learn that the much sought-after Regius Professorship of Greek was awarded by Queen Anne to one Anglo-Saxon specialist because she admired his bravery in undergoing a leg amputation, rather than because of any affinity with his subject.

She writes in an authoritative and hugely readable fashion and avoids anachronistic value judgements. Still, she approvingly cites Elizabeth Longford’s observation that the university dons denigrated women journalists as ‘aggressive’ and sneered that female writers such as Brittain ‘had had a memorable love experience’.

If there’s a pervasive theme, it’s the way anyone who was slightly out of the ordinary in the rarefied Oxford milieu – whether gay, from a humble background or female – would never be allowed to feel they truly belonged, however brilliant they were. Plus ça change?

Alexander Larman is literary editor of Spectator World

All hands on deck

MARK BOSTRIDGE Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea By Tom de Freston Granta £16.99

Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa made a huge impression on the young Eugène Delacroix. The moment he came out of the artist’s studio, he started running ‘like a madman’ and didn’t stop until he reached his own room.

Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819, this vast canvas, five yards high and eight yards long, thrilled and repelled observers in equal measure. Rolled up and shipped to London the following year, the painting was displayed at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, opposite what

Tom de Freston, an artist in his thirties, has long been obsessed with Géricault’s painting. To him, The Raft is a microcosm of the worst that humans are capable of doing to one another, but with a glimpse of the hope offered by that ghostly ship in the distance.

His book gives us a painter’s insights into the eight months taken by Géricault, still only in his twenties at the time, to complete his masterpiece.

But Wreck also offers a modern counterpoint. De Freston writes of his own attempts to create an ambitious body of work that deals with themes of suffering and endurance. He wants to translate into a mix of paint and collage the trauma of Ali, a Syrian academic who lost his sight in a terrorist attack in Damascus in 1997.

At the same time, though, de Freston is combating the pain in his own life around his relationship with his ‘monster’ of a father, who has recently died. Géricault shaved his head and locked himself away in his studio to paint, partly to escape the despair he felt at the end of his relationship with Alexandrine, his aunt by marriage.

De Freston is consumed by a fierce desire to convey the horror of someone else’s experience, while recognising he is also being forced to confront his own.

His account burns with an intensity that’s sometimes disturbing and bewildering and, more often than not, powerfully moving. Tragically, at the end of the book, that burning intensity is literally reflected in the fire that destroys de Freston’s studio and several years’ work. Yet de Freston remains hopeful about the art he will create in the future.

In the final pages, you have an overwhelming sense of him facing up to the problems in his life and art, very much running towards and not away from them.

Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19)

is now the turning into Bond Street. Forty thousand people handed over a shilling – £10 in modern terms – to see it. They’d come expecting to experience a frisson of terror and they weren’t disappointed.

Even today, standing in the Louvre before the picture, you are likely to feel some sense of giddy discomfort. The vertiginous angle of its tilted stage threatens the collapse of the divide between painting and spectator. You imagine the seawater spilling over the frame and flooding the gallery or, more nightmarishly, that the jumble of human bodies, dead and alive, is on the verge of falling forward onto the floor at your feet.

For contemporary observers, the painting was tied to a real-life tragedy that scandalised Bourbon France. In 1816, the flagship Medusa, carrying soldiers and settlers to the French colony of Senegal, foundered off the West African coast. The captain and over 200 passengers occupied the lifeboats, while 150 others were forced onto a hastily constructed raft that was quickly cast adrift and stranded on the high seas.

Almost two weeks passed before the raft was spotted by a rescue ship, the Argus. There were 15 survivors. During their days at sea, some passengers on the raft had mutinied, killing others. Many of the dying and incapacitated had been thrown into the shark-infested waters.

Cannibalism had been resorted to. At the time of their rescue, survivors were described as ‘lying on the boards, hands and mouths still dripping with the blood of their unhappy victims, shreds of flesh hanging from the raft’s mast’.

The painting has slipped history’s anchor, as Julian Barnes once memorably wrote, and in so doing it captures forms of suffering that transcend its subject matter. The black man waving towards the horizon reminds us that France’s colonial empire was built on the backs of African slaves. To a 21st-century eye, the plight of the survivors on the raft may bring to mind the refugee migrants currently risking their lives crossing the seas in small boats. Mark Bostridge is author of Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend