Jean Louis Andre Theodore Gericault was a French painter and a seminal figure of the 19th-century romantic movement in art.

Gericault, born into a wealthy Rouen family, studied with the French painters Carle Vernet and Pierre Guerin and also traveled to Italy to study from 1816 to 1817. He was greatly influenced by the work of Michelangelo and other Italian Renaissance painters. Early in his career, Gericault's paintings began to exhibit qualities that set him apart from such neoclassical French painters as Jacques-Louis David. Gericault soon became the acknowledged leader of the French romantics. His Charging Chasseur (1812, Musee du Louvre, Paris) and Wounded Cuirassier (1814, Musee du Louvre) display violent action, bold design, and dramatic color, and evoke powerful emotion.The painting's disturbing combination of idealized figures and realistically depicted agony, as well as its gigantic size and graphic detail, aroused a storm of controversy between neoclassical and romantic artists.

In 1820 Gericault traveled to England. At the time of his death, Gericault was engaged in painting a series of portraits of mental patients that demonstrate the preoccupation of the romantic artists with derangement and neurosis.