Ile St Louis, Antoine Louis Barye(english)

ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE (1796 – 1875)

 

Barye is known as the most famous animal sculptor and the creator of a new class of art. He was born in Paris where he spent all his life. His initial professional training was in metalwork then he trained in the fine arts with sculptor François-Joseph Bosio and painter Baron Gros. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts School) during 5 years. He worked as a craftsman for the goldsmith Fauconnier. But he began to be very interested in animal by watching the wild beasts in the Jardin des Plantes and making studies of them in pencil drawings and then modelling them in sculpture. The first orders from the government took place, and in the thirties the royal family of Orleans ordered him many sculptures.

For many years he has been a drawing teacher at the Museum of Natural History, and was received at the Academy of Fine Arts later in his life in 1868.

He is buried in the Père Lachaise graveyard

Barye was a great anatomist and he studied the animals with a scientific precision. Thanks to his keen observation of the animal, he was able to present the different expressions of animals, of fights between animals or fights between man and animal. We are in the romantic period, and for the Romantics the animal represents a part still intact of the creation, threaten by the modernity.

Most of his work was made of bronze

But he did not success only in animal sculpture. He received several government commissions such as ornamental eagle relieves for the Pont d'Iéna (1849); a series of decorative masks for the Pont Neuf (c. 1851); four allegorical seated groups (Strength, Order, Peace, and War) for the facade of the Louvre (1854).

He also created monumental compositions such as equestrian statues of Napoleon at Ajaccio and Grenoble, the lion hunting or Theseus, allegorical sculptures such as the three graces, and a sculpture of Saint Clotilde for the church of the Madeleine.