Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man!... plate 2 from Various Subjects Drawn from Life and on Stone (The English Suite)
February 1821
Medium
Lithograph in black on ivory wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 31.7 × 37.1 cm (12 1/2 × 14 5/8 in.); Sheet: 37.6 × 49.5 cm (14 13/16 × 19 1/2 in.)
Classification
lithograph
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
121988
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
These lithographs from The English Suite exhibit Théodore Géricault’s attention to working horses and the urban poor of 19th-century London. Two prints depict the horse-shoeing process; in one, the French farrier holds the horse’s hoof while an apprentice prepares a horseshoe in the back room. In another print, a Flemish farrier affixes the hot metal. In the pair of prints, an elderly man and woman are stranded in the city streets; bakers ignore the man slumped below their open shop window.
About the Artist
Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault · 1791–1824
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) was born into a prosperous bourgeois family in Rouen, France, the son of a lawyer who managed the family tobacco business. After moving to Paris around 1797, his artistic talent emerged early, nurtured in a circle that included his maternal uncle Jean-Baptiste Caruel and art dealer Jean-Louis Laneuville. Géricault began formal training in 1808 under ...