Antoine-Louis Barye

B. Fabre & Fils, Paris
Acquired from the above, December 1960

Stuart Pivar, The Barye Bronzes, a catalogue raisonné, Suffolk, 1974, p. 170, no. A  82 
Michel Poletti and Alain Richarme, BARYE, Catalogue raisonné des sculptures, Paris, 2000, p. 236, no. A 96

Overall in good original condition and with its original patina. Light scratches to surface consistent with age and handling.
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Barye's powerful and dynamic bronze of a struggling hare captured between the jaws of a jaguar is among his greatest works. A work of contrasts, it is sublimely primal and physiologically complex. Although Barye was an academic sculptor, his work was progressive and his animalier effected a new sculptural iconography that was not reliant on historical or biblical narrative, but drawn from nature instead. The stark contrasts of the sleek and muscular jaguar pitted against the gentle and hapless hare alludes to the fragility of the human condition. In Theophile Gautier's (1811-1872) words, Barye’s work represents a "triumph of the spirit over the material...over the voracious world of animals."

Bayre entered a plaster Jaguar devourant un lièvre in the Salon of 1850 after an eighteen-year hiatus, and it went virtually unnoticed by critics relative to his mythological works. However, when he exhibited a bronze of the same subject the following year (the same scale of the present work) audiences were in rapture (bronze, Louvre, Paris). Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896) wrote that the bronze marked a turning point in sculpture, "in which the school of historicism had died, given way to art that was both visible and palpable. Just as landscape replaced historical subjects in painting, animals are doing likewise in sculpture. Nature has succeeded man. It represents the evolution of modern art." Indeed it did; Henri Matisse chose Barye’s bronze as the model for his own first attempt at sculpture (fig 1).  While a skilled painter by the late nineteenth century, Matisse’s interest in sculpting led him to evening courses at the École communale de la ville de Paris.  Students were asked to make a copy after a work in the Louvre and Matisse selected Barye’s compelling bronze for his inspiration.  From 1899 to 1901 Matisse obsessively worked on his interpretation of Jaguar devouring a hare (going so far as to work blindfolded in order to increase his feel for the form).  Save for a small sculpture of a horse, Matisse’s Jaguar devouring a hare  is his only animal cast and would mark the beginning of a brilliant career as a sculptor (Dorothy Kosinski, Jay McKean Fisher and Steven Nash, Matisse: painter as sculptor, exh. cat., Baltimore Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center New Haven, 2007, p. 100).