On the second of July 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground on the Bank of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania. The frigate had been sailing under a politically appointed captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had not commanded a ship in twenty-five years and was at his post through political favour rather than competence. There were not enough lifeboats. One hundred and forty-seven crew and passengers were placed on a hastily built raft, towed behind the lifeboats; the towlines were cut, intentionally or accidentally, and the raft was abandoned in open ocean. After thirteen days at sea, fifteen people were alive when the rescue ship Argus picked them up. They had survived through saltwater drinking, dehydration, mutiny, summary execution of fellow survivors, and cannibalism.

The political scandal nearly toppled the restoration government of Louis XVIII. Two of the survivors (Henri Savigny, the surgeon, and Alexandre Corréard, the engineer) published a detailed memoir in 1817 that the government tried to suppress. Théodore Géricault, twenty-seven and looking for a subject that would establish his career at the Paris Salon, read the memoir, decided to paint the disaster, and committed to it with unusual intensity. He shaved his head so he could not socialise. He interviewed both Savigny and Corréard. He visited morgues to study the colour of dead skin. He had a carpenter build a small replica of the raft in his studio. He worked for nearly two years.

The finished painting is five metres by seven and depicts the moment the survivors first sight the rescue ship Argus on the horizon. The composition rises from corpses in the foreground (carefully posed, anatomically correct, painted with the colours Géricault had verified in the morgues) to the central group of figures clinging to a makeshift mast, then peaks at a Black sailor at the top of the pyramid waving a red and white cloth at a ship so distant on the horizon it is only a smudge of paint. The choice to place the Black figure at the apex (a sailor named Jean Charles, identified by Corréard) was a political statement Géricault did not soften. The French government had restored slavery in its overseas colonies in 1802; the painting is among other things an abolitionist work, signed at the moment the abolitionist cause was illegal to argue publicly.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1819 under the bland title Scène de naufrage, a shipwreck scene. Everyone understood. The painting was bought by the French state after Géricault's death in 1824 and hangs at the Louvre in the Salle Mollien. The historical incident is now remembered almost entirely through Géricault's painting; the survivors' memoir is read only by specialists. The painting outlived the scandal it depicted and became the canonical European image of political incompetence's cost.