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The theme of Géricault's Study of Feet and Hands is a fragment. Thus his still-life shows broken facets of an event, one that has resulted in the death of the individuals whose severed limbs are arranged here, in a dramatic scenario that unleashes emotional responses. Géricault succeeds in lending the macabre motif a peculiar life of its own. It is as if the painter were concerned to dissolve the boundary between the part and the whole, the dead and the living. There is an air of tenderness in the way in which arm is draped around a foot. The intimate interlacing of a woman's arm and a man's legs may also conceal an element of eroticism.
The limbs were possibly painted after living models. Géricault painted fragments of body parts not only as preparatory studies for the greatest of his masterpieces, the Raft of the Medusa (Paris, Louvre); some he painted later as works more or less in a genre of their own: starting from functional oil sketches, he developed them into an autonomous form.
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