Artists Past and Present; Random Studies

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

Antoine Louis Barye, born at Paris September 15, 1796, died June 25, 1875, in the same year with Corot and at the same age. The circumstances under which he began his career have been told in detail by more than one biographer, but it would be difficult rightly to estimate the importance and singularity of his work without some review of them. His father was a jeweler of Lyons, who settled in Paris before Antoine was born, and whose idea of education for his son was to place him at less than fourteen with an engraver of military equipments from whom he learned to engrave on steel and other metals, and later with a jeweler from whom he learned to make steel matrixes for molding reliefs from thin metals. A certain stress has been laid on this lack of schooling in the conventional sense of the word, but it is difficult to see that it did much harm, since Barye, though he was not a correct writer of French, was a great reader, keenly intelligent in his analysis of the knowledge he gained from books, and with extraordinary power of turning it to his own uses. Such a mind does not seriously miss the advantages offered by a formal training, and it might fairly be argued that the manual skill developed at the work-bench was in the long run more valuable to him than the abstract knowledge which he might have acquired in school could possibly have been. Be that as it may, up to the time of his marriage in 1823 he had a varied apprenticeship. At sixteen he was drawn as a conscript and was first assigned to the department where maps in relief are modeled. Before he was twenty-one he was working with a sculptor called Bosio, and also in the studio of the painter, Baron Gros. He studied Lamarck, Cuvier and Buffon. He competed five times for the Prix de Rome at the Salon, once in the section of medals and four times in the section of sculpture, succeeding once (in the first competition) in gaining a second prize. He then went back to the jeweler's bench for eight years, varying the monotony of his work by modeling independently small reliefs of Eagle and Serpent, Eagle and Antelope, Leopard, Panther, and other animals.

In 1831 he sent to the Salon of that year the Tiger Devouring a Gavial of the Ganges, a beautiful little bronze, seven and a half inches high, which won a Second Medal and was bought by the Government for the Luxembourg. This was the beginning of his true career. In the same Salon was exhibited his Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, but the powerful realism and energy of the animal group represented what henceforth was to be Barye's characteristic achievement, the realization, that is, of what the Chinese call the "movement of life;" the strange reality of appearance that is never produced by imitation of nature and that makes the greatness of art. The tiger clutches its victim with great gaunt paws, its eyes are fixed upon the prey, its body is drawn together with tense muscles, its tail is curled, the serpent is coiled about the massive neck of its destroyer with large undulating curves. The touch is everywhere certain, the composition is dignified, and the group as an exhibition of extraordinary knowledge is noteworthy.

A lithograph portrait of Barye by Gigoux, made at about this time, shows a fine head, interested eyes, a firm mouth and a determined chin. His chief qualities were perseverance, scientific curiosity, modesty and pride, and that indomitable desire for perfection so rarely encountered and so precious an element in the artist's equipment. He was little of a talker, little of a writer, infinitely studious, somewhat reserved and cold in manner, yet fond of good company and not averse to good dinners. Guillaume said of him that he had the genius of great science and of high morality, which is the best possible definition in a single phrase of his artistic faculty. He had the kind of sensitiveness, or self-esteem, if you will, that frequently goes with a mind confident of its merits, but not indifferent to criticism or sufficiently elevated and aloof to dispense with resentment. In 1832 he sent to the Salon his Lion Crushing a Serpent, and in 1833 he sent a dozen animal sculptures, a group of medallions and six water-colors. That year he was made chevalier of the Legion of Honour, but the following year nine groups made for the Duke of Orleans were rejected by the Salon jury, and again in 1836 several small pieces were rejected, although the Seated Lion, later bought by the government, was accepted. The reasons for the rejections are not entirely clear, but Barye was an innovator, and in the field of art the way of the innovator is far harder than that of the transgressor. Charges of commercialism were among those made against him, and he—the least commercial of men—took them deeply to heart. His bitterness assumed a self-respecting but an inconvenient and unprofitable form, as he made up his mind to exhibit thereafter only in his own workshop, a resolution to which he held for thirteen years. After the rejection of his groups in 1834 he happened to meet Jules Dupré, who expressed his disgust with the decision. "It is quite easy to understand," Barye replied, "I have too many friends on the jury." This touch of cynicism indicates the ease with which he was wounded, but it was equally characteristic of him that in planning his simple revenge he hurt only himself. He did indeed refrain from sending his bronzes to the Salon and he did act as his own salesman, and the result was the incurrence of a heavy debt. To meet this he was obliged to sell all his wares to a founder who wanted them for the purpose of repeating them in debased reproductions. His own care in obtaining the best possible results in each article that he produced, his reluctance to sell anything of the second class, and his perfectly natural dislike to parting with an especially beautiful piece under any circumstances, did not, of course, work to his business advantage, although the amateurs who have bought the bronzes that came from his own refining hand have profited by it immensely. It would be a mistake, however, to think of him as a crushed or even a deeply misfortunate man. He simply was poor and not appreciated by the general public according to his merits. After 1850, however, he had enough orders from connoisseurs, many of them Americans, and also from the French government to make it plain that his importance as an artist was firmly established at least in the minds of a few. He sold his work at low prices which since his death have been trebled and quadrupled, in fact, some of his proofs have increased fifty-fold, but the fact that he was not overwhelmed with orders gave him that precious leisure to spend upon the perfecting of his work which, we may fairly assume, was worth more to him than money.

Nor was he entirely without honor in his own country. At the Universal Exposition of 1855 he received the Grand Medal of Honour in the section of artistic bronzes, and in the same year the Officer's Cross of Legion of Honour—a dignity that is said to have reached poor Rousseau only when he was too near death to receive the messengers. In 1868 Barye was made Member of the Institute, although two years earlier he had been humiliated by having his application refused. And from America, in addition to numerous proofs of the esteem in which he was held there by private amateurs, he received through Mr. Walters in 1875 an order to supply the Corcoran Gallery at Washington with an example of every bronze he had made. 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. Here he had sympathy, excellent talk of excellent things, the company of artists working as he did, with profound sincerity and intelligence, and he had a chance himself to paint in the vast loneliness of the woods where he could let his imagination roam, and could find a home for his tigers and lions and bears studied in menageries and in the Jardin des Plantes. It is pleasant also to think of him among the five and twenty Amis du Vendredi dining together at little wineshops on mutton and cheese and wine with an occasional pâté given as a treat by some member in funds for the moment. He was not above enthusiasm for "un certain pâté de maquereau de Calais" and he was fond of the theater and of all shows where animals were to be seen. It is pleasantest of all to think of him at his work, the beauty of which he knew and the ultimate success of which he could hardly have doubted.