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A paralyzed woman being transported along the street in a wheelchair. Lithograph by Théodore Gericault, 1821. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection.
The wheelchair is an improvisation produced by adding leather or fabric side-walls and crude wooden wheels to an ordinary chair. The man who pulls it along the street stops for a rest. On the left, a young woman looks at the chair with a fearful expression. The child who accompanies her pays no attention, but holds a toy horse. In the right background a real horse is driven through the fog by a coachman. On the wall at back, a fragment of a poster advertising a remedy
"When [C.R.] Cockerell saw Géricault's lithographs in November 1821, he was most struck by the three that deal with the spectacle of urban poverty, 'the paralytic woman, the piper & poor beggar', admiring the 'uncommon energy' of execution, the 'pathetic'. and the 'deep feeling of pity' in them, commenting in his journal that 'when works of art attain their utmost perfection they are eminently calculated to awaken thoughts of energy and virtue'. These three prints in fact stand out as the most exceptional and, in subject-matter, most memorable among the Various Subjects. Though they owe something to the English tradition of genre and were perhaps consciously undertaken as essays in an English speciality, they are original in their attitude towards their subjects and in their disregard for the moral and sentimental conventions inseparable from social genre in England. There is no trace in them of Hogarth's didacticism, of Wheatley's sensibility, or of the sweetness and dignity-in-rags that gave a certain attractiveness to paupers in the work of Gainsborough, Morland and their followers; nor, finally, do they have Wilkie's narrative pantomime, much admired by Géricault but happily not imitated. The objectivity with which he pictured distress and human decay in their social settings had no close parallel in English art. He was, as always, stirred by the concrete and factual: the stronger the emotion that accompanied his work, the more closely he attended to the physical reality before him. The pathos of his scenes of suffering lies in their emphatic materiality, in a weightiness and bigness that in his work stands for intensity of feeling. The deep feeling of pity that Cockerell noticed in him did, in fact, release an 'uncommon energy'. These lithographs have a graphic vigour that his more elegant watercolours lack."—Eitner, loc. cit.
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