Antoine-Louis Barye and a Victorian Bronze Age

PP has a 20” plaster casting of a Dromedary (Arabian) camel ‘after’ (reproduced from) a sculpture by Antoine-Louis Barye (1795-1875), the great bronze artist/animalier of the mid-19^th century. Sculpture of this period, in which Barye was a leading figure, had a story to tell; and it was a monumental story. This is the period of large scale, commentative and narrative civic sculpture that appealed to sentiment, sensationalism, and great power. 

A major theme of sculpture of this period are images of nature’s predatory violence; for example, a grand battle between a lion and a jaguar, the struggle and conquest usually involving exotic animals portrayed with stylistic realistic accuracy. 

Barye made his debut as a sculptor in the Salon of 1831. Although he would never leave France in his lifetime, he exhibited what would become his signature theme: jungle violence. The Salons were strictly juried by conservative “academic” artists, and open to collectors who had the money and the taste for large scale garden or civic sculpture. Here, Barye showed his maquettes (smaller plaster casts). One particular work caught the eye of the Minister of the Interior of France, who purchased Lion Crushing a Serpent and had it cast in 1833 for the public Tuileries Gardens (today the Musée du Louvre). Barye’s reputation was set; many more monumental government and Royal Family commissions were garnered. One notable commission was the “July” Column, built 1835-1840 at the Place de la Bastille, a memorial of the fall of Charles X of France to the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe. Barye created the bronze bas-reliefs for the base of the column, notably the Gallic Rooster, in full throated crow (the National symbol of France), and, of course, a lion and prey. 

A monumental, seated lion was commissioned in 1846 to be placed alongside Lion Crushing a Serpent at the Tuileries Gardens. The Duc d’Orléanscommissioned a series of sculptures of animals pursued by various regional human hunters portrayed throughout the history of France. The Royal Family began to collect smaller scale “Tabletop” sculptures as well as to commission large, monumental works for their sculpture gardens and parks, such as two monumental images of Napoleon I, mounted. 

Barye’s smaller sculptures were created with new technological developments in bronze casting in Paris. Barye seized on this opportunity to create ½ scale or smaller works based on his famous monumental pieces, selling directly to the upper and middle classes in the U.S. and Europe.

As an entrepreneur, engineer, and artist of great ability in the reproduction of accurate animal physiology, Barye won the Grand Gold Medal for technical achievement in the Industrial Arts at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855. On the other side of the Fair Grounds, he took a medal for Jaguar Devouring a Hare in the Fine Arts Section. This marked the beginning of the debate that still rages today: What divides mechanically produced decorative art and fine art?

In 1854 Barye was made Master of Zoological drawing at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, and it was around this period in his life that PP’s ‘Camel’ (the original) was cast in a small scale and marketed to a middle class willing to pay a good price for scenes of exotic animals in jungle predation for their mantelpieces. This market was also interested in smaller reproductions of grand monumental civic sculpture by Barye. 

A word on the subject of the camel: Barye had sculpted two of the three types of camels in his career. PP’s is a Dromedary camel, the largest of its species. A male can be 2.4 m at the shoulder and live to be 50 years old. The Bactrian camel is two humped and domesticated in the Mongolian steppes of central Asia. They are pack animals known for their tolerance to cold, drought, and high altitudes, and this fortitude made possible the great trade route along the Silk Road from the 16^th century onwards. Barye did not sculpt the Bactrian Wild Camel of Northwest China, (Gobi Desert), a separate species from the Bactrian Camel, as it was never domesticated. This hardy species has double eyelashes, and for hydration can survive on snow, and even water whose salinity exceeds that of seawater.

Barye, in works like PP’s camel, set the benchmark for animal and small-scale bronzes as fine art in the 19^th century. If PP had a ‘Lion Devouring Something’ there is little market for such subjects today, despite their being important works of a certain taste and time. His camel, however, is worth $4,000 as a good quality reproduction of a work by Barye.