Step into a locked Paris studio in 1818 and you would smell death before you saw the canvas. A 27-year-old painter with a shaved head demanded absolute silence from his teenage assistant, kept severed limbs from hospital morgues as reference material, and left a decapitated head from a local asylum on the roof to study decay. This episode follows Theodore Gericault as he turned a national scandal into a monumental painting. We begin with the 1816 wreck of the frigate Meduse, run aground off West Africa by an inexperienced royalist captain, and the 150 people abandoned on a makeshift raft when the officers in the lifeboats cut the tow ropes. After 13 days of mutiny, murder, and cannibalism, only 15 survived.

Gericault chose to self-fund a painting of this politically explosive subject rather than wait for a safe commission. He interviewed su ...