"Leave the fine stallions, converging battle troops and court commissions to the Vernets and their honoured friends. Here was his space. Scorched implacable skies, clouds raining dust. An ocean so tumultuous and vast it would hurt your eyes to stare at it for long. Men huddled on an improbable tempest-tossed raft. Mere planks lashed by rotting cords.
Perhaps he had chanced on a subject for the King's Salon at last."
Set in Paris in 1818, during the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration, The God of Spring tells the story of painter Theodore Gericault. Having won a Gold Medal at the prestigious Salon at the tender age of twenty-one, he is now, seven years later, searching for the subject of his next masterpiece. But he is lovesick, hopelessly addicted to his benefactor-uncle's young wife, Alexandrine, six years his senior. Every moment without her is an eternity. Nothing else can hold his thoughts.
Until he hears the story of the shipwreck of the French frigate Medusa off the shores of the West African coast and the abandonment of one hundred and fifty souls on an unseaworthy makeshift raft. It was a catastrophe that fascinated and horrified the French public, with its tales of grand betrayal, madness, murder and cannibalism. When he manages to track down two of the raft's survivors, Gericault knows he has finally found his subject, if only he can maintain his sanity.