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Updated: May 2, 2025
When he did, he was hardly less successful; and the four splendid groups that decorate the Pavillons Denon and Richelieu of the Louvre are in the very front rank of the heroic sculpture of the modern world. From Barye to the Institute is a long way. Nothing could be more interhostile than his sculpture and that of the professors at the École des Beaux-Arts.
Here he unlocked a drawer, took out a still smaller key a flat one this time removed some books and a small Barye bronze tiger from what appeared to be a high square table, rolled back the cloth, bringing into view an old-fashioned safe, applied the key and swung back a heavy steel door.
A few pieces are found with the initial of this man, showing that they were done under his supervision and not that of Barye, but whether before or after the death of the latter is not yet determined.
And the statue once in place was conspicuous for its fine sense of unity. It was not, of course, this meticulous method, but the use he made of it, that led Barye to his great results. His mind was strengthened and enriched by every fragment of knowledge with which he fed it.
This last tribute moved him to tears, and he replied, "Ah! Monsieur Walters, my own country has never done anything like that for me!" These certainly were far from being trivial satisfactions, and Barye had also reaped a harvest of even subtler joys. One likes to think of him in Barbizon, living in cordial intimacy with Diaz and Rousseau and Millet and the great Daumier.
At the sale of his effects after his death the models with the right of reproduction were sold, and in many instances these modern proofs are on the market bearing the name of Barye, with no indication of their modernity. Some of these are so cleverly done that great knowledge is required to detect them, and if they were sold for a moderate price, would be desirable possessions.
One held torn and ragged folds of the veil ripped from her throat, the other the weapon with which she had cheated death: a bronze paperweight, probably a miniature copy of a Barye, an elephant trumpeting. The up-flung trunk was darkly stained and sticky.... With a shudder she dropped the bronze, and looked down. Victor lay at her feet, supine, grotesquely asprawl.
He was a liberal in politics, the sincere friend of the working-classes, and was on intimate terms with men of letters, even with Victor Hugo, in spite of his advanced opinions. He was a patron of art and artists. Some beautiful table-pieces that he had ordered, by Barye, are now in the gallery of Mr. W. S. Walters, of Baltimore, they not having been completed when he died.
The green lurking in the shadows and the coppery gleam on the ridge of the spine, the thigh, and the bristling mane, the rich yet bright intermediate tones, give a wonderful brilliancy and vitality to the magnificent little piece in which the ferocity of nature and the charm and lovableness of art are commingled. In his interesting book on Barye, published by the Barye Monument Association, Mr.
M. Emmanuel Frémiet occupies a place by himself. There have been but two modern sculptors who have shown an equally pronounced genius for representing animals namely, Barye, of course, and Barye's clever but not great pupil, Cain. The tigress in the Central Park, perhaps the best bronze there (the competition is not exacting), and the best also of the several variations of the theme of which, at one time, the sculptor apparently could not tire, familiarizes Americans with the talent of Cain. In this association Rouillard, whose horse in the Trocadéro Gardens is an animated and elegant work, ought to be mentioned, but it is hardly as good as the neighboring elephant of Frémiet as mere animal representation (the genre exists and has excellences and defects of its own), while in more purely artistic worth it is quite eclipsed by its rival. Still if fauna is interesting in and of itself, which no one who knows Barye's work would controvert, it is still more interesting when, to put it brutally, something is done with it. In his ambitious and colossal work at the Trocadéro, M. Frémiet does in fact use his fauna freely as artistic material, though at first sight it is its zoölogical interest that appears paramount. The same is true of the elephant near by, in which it seems as if he had designedly attacked the difficult problem of rendering embodied awkwardness decorative. Still more conspicuous, of course, is the artistic interest, the fancy, the humor, the sportive grace of his Luxembourg group of a young satyr feeding honey to a brace of bear's cubs, because he here concerns himself more directly with his idea and gives his genius freer play. And everyone will remember the sensation caused by his impressively repulsive "Gorilla Carrying off a Woman." But it is when he leaves this kind of thing entirely, and, wholly forgetful of his studies at the Jardin des Plantes, devotes himself to purely monumental work, that he is at his best. And in saying this I do not at all mean to insist on the superiority of monumental sculpture to the sculpture of fauna; it is superior, and Barye himself cannot make one content with the exclusive consecration of admirable talent to picturesque anatomy illustrating distinctly unintellectual passions. M. Frémiet, in ecstasy over his picturesque anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, would scout this; but it is nevertheless true that in such works as the "Âge de la pierre," which, if it may be called a monumental clock-top, is nevertheless certainly monumental; his "Louis d'Orléans," in the quadrangle of the restored Château de Pierrefonds; his "Jeanne d'Arc" (the later statue is not, I think, essentially different from the earlier one); and his "Torch-bearer" of the Middle Ages, in the new Hôtel de Ville of Paris, not only is his subject a subject of loftier and more enduring interest than his elephants and deer and bears, but his own genius finds a more congenial medium of expression. In other words, any one who has seen his "Torch-bearer" or his "Louis d'Orléans" must conclude that M. Frémiet is losing his time at the Jardin des Plantes. In monumental works of the sort he displays a commanding dignity that borders closely upon the grand style itself. The "Jeanne d'Arc" is indeed criticised for lack of style. The horse is fine, as always with M. Frémiet; the action of both horse and rider is noble, and the homogeneity of the two, so to speak, is admirably achieved. But the character of the Maid is not perfectly satisfactory to
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