Antique 19th Century French Bonze Animalier Brown Bear Statue Sculpture Paris After Antoine-Louis Barye Circa 1870

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A good antique bronze sculpture of a brown bear after the celebrated French Animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, circa 1870.
The … Read more A good antique bronze sculpture of a brown bear after the celebrated French Animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, circa 1870.
The bronze depicts a brown bear in a dynamic pose, head held up with a gaping jaw and one paw lifted and ready for action, the bear stands on a rocky outcrop and is raised on a black & white viened marble plinth. The bronze is cast by the lost wax method or "Cire Perdue" in French, the statue has a rich mellow patina and is signed "A. Barye".
Condition is excellent, the statue is possbibly a posthumous casting, the bronze is a considerable weight, it is very finely cast and is ready to grace your space.





Antoine-Louis Barye (1795, Paris, France—died 1875, Paris) was a prolific French sculptor, painter, and printmaker whose subject was primarily animals. He is known as the father of the modern Animalier school.
The son of a jeweler, he was apprenticed to an engraver of military equipment at about age 13. After serving in the army, he worked for a time in the jewelry trade. In about 1817 he began to sculpt while working in the studio of the sculptor François Bosio. He was also influenced by the Romantic paintings of Théodore Géricault. From 1823 to 1831 he worked with Jacques-Henri Fauconnier, a goldsmith.
Barye’s talent for rendering dynamic tension and exact anatomical detail is especially evident in his most famous bronzes, those of wild animals struggling with or devouring their prey.
Barye gradually gained a reputation as a monumental sculptor, with government commissions for images of wild animals in the 1830s, figure groups and portraits for the facade of the Louvre in the 1850s, and freestanding Napoleonic monuments in the 1860s. He first exhibited his bronzes at the Salons of 1827 and 1831, receiving a second prize for his Lion Devouring a Gavial. He withdrew from exhibiting in the Salon in the 1830s after a celebrated small-scale project was rejected as not being high art, but he returned in 1850, to great acclaim.
Generally speaking, Barye was responsible for improving the status of animal sculpture, a category famous since antiquity, and for demonstrating its suitability as a modern expressive form. He also gained special fame as an artist who, regardless of subject matter, could meld grandeur and artistic refinement with realism in both public monuments and small-scale bronzes for the home at a wide range of prices that the middle class could afford See less