Géricaults rediscovered in museums? Really?

The discovery or rediscovery of paintings attributed to great masters is a regular occurrence in art history. Attribution is not an exact science, and the identity of the authors of certain works has always been lost and then found again. Nothing could be more normal.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to proceed cautiously in this field, otherwise we sometimes end up not understanding anything, and we work on pieces that are not what we think they are, or what some people think they are.

For many years now, works supposedly by Théodore Géricault have been found in French museums. Not only are they published unreservedly as his work, without the cautious mention "attributed to", but this attribution is endorsed by the museums, which have no hesitation in noisily publicising these discoveries without any hindsight. They present them on their walls as authentic paintings by this artist, they show them in exhibitions under this name and sometimes they even organise an event around the rediscovered canvas.

But are these attributions correct? Based solely on ’connoisseurship’, the ’eye’, and almost never on tangible evidence, they are necessarily fragile, especially as - to put it mildly - they are not accepted by everyone.
The problem is not that these attributions are made. The problem is that they are endorsed without hindsight or caution by public institutions that are often not content with paintings belonging to museums, but do not hesitate to hang on their walls works from private collections whose attribution is sometimes just as questionable.

It is obviously difficult to publicly oppose these attributions because, when it comes to the eye, who is more legitimate? It is therefore necessary to rely either on the work of the few indisputable specialists who dare to speak out against these discoveries (but they are generally more than cautious in public), or - and this is what we will try to do here - on evidence that allows such attributions to be refuted without a…