Over the course of his career, Theodore Géricault created countless sketches and studies of executions in France, England, and Rome, but none so carefully crafted or thoroughly unsettling as his oil painting collection of severed limbs and heads just prior to his infamous entry of The Raft of Medusa into the Salon of 1819. Perhaps the most unsettling of these preliminary paintings, Study of Two Severed Heads not only prepared Gericault to craft his masterpiece, but also reflects his staunch opposition to capital punishment.

Though the work appears to be a pure study piece, some scholars have made claims that the painting may have been meant to stand on it’s own, citing the piece’s arrangement and the sketches which Gericault created in preparation for the “study.” Furthermore, neither of the two heads in the painting appear directly within Raft of Medusa, and though they likely assisted Gericault in depicting the limp lifeless form of the human corpse, the figures in each clearly share emotional as well as visual qualities. The artist acquired the male head in the painting from the Parisian hospital prison, Bicetre, the noggin having once belonged to a thief in the city. However, for the female head, Gericault hired a living model to pose for the painting, likely requesting her to emulate the expression of the head already in his possession. So, technically speaking, a more proper title might be Study of a Severed Head, and A Woman Playing Possum.

The use of a live model in a supposed study further suggests the possibility of social and political undertones within the piece. Gericault also likely exaggerated or even fabricated the blood stains that cover the sheets upon which the heads are placed, for the severed head would have been drained of blood by the time it came into his care, and the woman, given that her head was very much attached, would also have shed no blood. Despite its title and its label as a study piece, the painting subtly decries the use of the guillotine.