Géricault painted this work at the beginning of his career while training in the studio of the French Academy painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. This complex atmospheric composition shows off the young artist's ambition. The male nude, viewed from behind, is twisted across the canvas. The tension in his intertwined feet unfurls progressively as the eye ascends towards the figure's right hand. The work is dark and brooding other than the whites and yellows of the figure's flesh.

While the depiction of the nude was nothing new - nude studies or académies were an essential part of an artist's training - the way Géricault rendered the subject shows how revolutionary his approach to artmaking would be throughout his tragically short career. Conventional student studies of the male nude would have included a traditional, frontal pose set in a studio. This is abandoned entirely by Géricault who places the figure in a landscape and experiments with a radical way of presenting the body that allows for an exploration of his already developed understanding of anatomy. The dramatic contrapposto of the male nude also seems to presage the artist's later interest in Michelangelo and the expressive possibilities inherent in the body itself. Besides, the moody deployment of light and shade was unlike other student académies of the period. Through this work, we can anticipate the development of Romanticism.

Géricault's teacher did not enthusiastically accept this work. Guérin was known to continually criticize the artist for what he considered his unrealistic depiction of form and use of color. About these studies, he chastised Géricault by stating, "your colors are not realistic ... all these chiaroscuro contrasts would lead me to think that you always paint under the moonlight; as for your académies they resemble nature as much as a violin case resembles a violin."