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The French sculptor
Antoine-Louis Barye (1795-1875) was born into poverty, had little
formal schooling, and almost never left Paris, so his choice
of subject for his art is particularly surprising. For a half
century Antoine Barye created bronze sculptures of exotic wild
animals including lions, tigers, reptiles, and birds of prey
in minute detail. He often depicted them in mortal combat, captured
in the moment before the kill. His repertoire was vast and in
addition to the above included incredibly realistic depictions
of panthers, jaguars, ocelots, basset hounds, boars, deer, apes,
hares, pheasants, and herons.
Most Barye work was
signed, and perhaps the themes were influenced by the two years
he served in Napoleon's army, from 1812 to 1814. After the army,
Barye joined the studio of an academic sculptor named Francois
Bosio and trained as a metalworker in the workshop of Martin-Buillaume
Biennais, Napoleon's favorite silversmith. He subsequently went
to work for Baron Gros, a popular painter, and with whose support
he got into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Barye attended the prestigious
art academy from 1818 until 1823 but spent much of his time
sketching the zoo animals at the Jardin Des Plantes accompanied
by painter Eugene Delacroix. Once, when a lion died, both Barye
and Delacroix rushed to draw it at close range, and they studied
the reptiles at the natural history museum in Paris. Barye like
Delacroix was also involved in the Romantic movement that rejected
the order, harmony, idealization, and rationality of neoclassicism
and the Enlightenment. However, he had an eye for the weird
and exotic, and it was out of touch with public tastes and as
such didn't do well commercially.
He finally won a medal
for "Tiger Devouring a Gavial", a ferocious, crocodile
like creature, many years after his salon debut, and his first
commercial break came in 1834 when the Duc d'Orleans commissioned
a 20 foot long table centerpiece with five large groups of figures
depicting hunts of different regions and periods. They included
a tiger hunt with Indians on elephants spearing their prey,
a bull hunt, a lion hunt, a medieval bear hunt\, and an elk
hunt with Mongol warriors. In 1845 he established his own foundry
to produce small, affordable bronzes for the new French middle
class. However, he soon declared bankruptcy, for he was far
too much of a perfectionist to make a profit. From 1848 to 1857
he used others to cast his sculptures including Emile Martin;
in general, these external casts over which he had less hand
on influence carried the signature "A. L. Barye" versus
"Barye" that he used previously. In 1851 Barye began
exhibiting at the Salon again with "Jaguar Devouring a
Hare", a sculpture which subsequently went to the Louvre.
In 1854, he became a professor of drawings at the natural history
museum and in 1868 he was elected to the French Academy of Fine
Arts. He died in 1875, and after his death the foundry owner
Ferdinand Barbedienne purchased most of his plasters and models
and made casts of them through the 1920s. Barbedienne foundry
posthumous casts are marked "F. Barbedienne Foundeur."
In 1899, a New York
gallery organized a Barye retrospective to raise money for a
Barye monument in Paris. The campaign was successful, and the
monument was erected in the 1890s in Barye Square on the eastern
tip of the Ile St.-Louis. It was a statue of Theseus battling
a centaur and stood until World War II when Germans melted the
bronze and subsequently recast after the war. Barye was the
foremost animalier of perhaps all time, whose sculptures and
their raw representations of the violence of nature have mesmerized
collectors and art lovers for nearly two centuries.
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