The subject of marine tragedy was undertaken by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), who, like many English artists, probably saw Géricault's painting when it was exhibited in London in 1820.[74][75] His A Disaster at Sea (c. 1835) chronicled a similar incident, this time a British catastrophe, with a swamped vessel and dying figures also placed in the foreground. Placing a coloured figure in the centre of the drama was revisited by Turner, with similar abolitionist overtones, in his The Slave Ship (1840).[74]
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899, 71.5 cm × 124.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Gulf Stream (1899), by the American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910), replicates the composition of The Raft of the Medusa with a damaged vessel, ominously surrounded by sharks and threatened by a waterspout. Like Géricault, Homer makes a black man the pivotal figure in the scene, though here he is the vessel's sole occupant. A ship in the distance mirrors the Argus from Géricault's painting.[76] The move from the drama of Romanticism to the new Realism is exemplified by the stoic resignation of Homer's figure.[77] The man's condition, which in earlier works might have been characterised by hope or helplessness, has turned to "sullen rage".[76]
In the early 90's, sculptor John Connell, in his Raft Project, a collaborative project with painter Eugene Newmann, recreated The Raft of the Medusa by making life-sized sculptures out of wood, paper and tar and placing them on a large wooden raft.[78]
Remarking on the contrast between the dying figures in the foreground and the figures in the mid-ground waving towards the approaching rescue ship, the French art historian Georges-Antoine Borias wrote that Géricault's painting represents, "on the one hand, desolation and death. On the other, hope and life."[79]
For Kenneth Clark, The Raft of the Medusa "remains the chief example of romantic pathos expressed through the nude; and that obsession with death, which drove Géricault to frequent mortuary chambers and places of public execution, gives truth to his figures of the dead and the dying. Their outlines may be taken from the classics, but they have been seen again with a craving for violent experience."[40]
Today, a bronze bas-relief of The Raft of the Medusa by Antoine Étex adorns Géricault's grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.[80]