Barye was first and foremost a sculptor of wild animals. The famous exhibit in the Salon of 1831, which first brought him into notice, could only have been modelled by one who knew the anatomy of the beasts of the forest as completely as the Greeks knew the human form. The group represented a death struggle between a crocodile and a tiger. Barye showed the crocodile clutching, in mortal agony, at the neck of the tiger. The tiger, with gleaming eyes, bites fiercely into its enemy’s body.
When we compare such a subject with the Venuses and Apollos with which his fellows concerned themselves, Barye’s connection with the Romanticists is at once evident. The pith and marrow of Romanticism is a distrust of the commonplace and a longing to bring new worlds of experience within the ken of the artist. Take a few of the leaders of the Romantic Movement at random. In literature, Scott, Byron, Heine, and Victor Hugo. In painting, Gericault, Turner, and Delacroix. One and all sought to arouse the world from a state of contentment which Ruskin adroitly illustrated by the image of the happiness of the squirrel in his circular prison. The end of their endeavour was to extend the sphere of art beyond the graceful, the fanciful, and the commonplace.
But the mere discovery of a fresh field for the sculptor is only a part of the debt which we moderns owe to Barye. His supreme gift lay in his power to treat the new subjects without ever transgressing the limits set by his medium. “A genius in his conception of art and by his power of expressing it,” is the verdict of his pupil, Rodin. The truth of this can be seen at once in any of Barye’s famous works—the “Lion” in the courtyard of the Louvre, for instance, or the brilliant “[Centaur and Lapith],” in the same collection. Nothing to be compared with them as studies in animal life, had been given to the world since the days of the Assyrian sculptors, who worked with the knowledge that only a race of hunters can possess.
Barye’s supreme skill in his own sphere militated against his influence ever becoming as general as it deserved. As a rule he confined himself to small works. In the nature of things, he could not expect the numerous commissions which an equally gifted craftsman with a larger range of subject would have secured. Hence, though Barye must be recognized as one of the pioneers of Romanticism in his art, only a pedant can regard him as the father of modern French sculpture. This position belongs to Carpeaux.
Born in 1827, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux started his career under the most favourable circumstances. He was a pupil of Rude. Not only did he inherit the technical skill of his master, but he carried away something of the fine human sympathy which characterized the great sculptor of the Revolutionary period. Carpeaux was wont to say that he “never passed Rude’s ‘Chant du Départ’ without raising his hat.” Winning the Prix de Rome in 1854, Carpeaux proved that a new force had arisen in French sculpture when he exhibited his “Neapolitan Fisher Lad” in 1858, a work which strongly recalls Rude’s very similar study. Carpeaux’s full power was revealed three years later, when he finished his famous group of “Ugolino and his Sons,” now in the Louvre at Paris.
Perhaps no work contains more of the spirit of Carpeaux than the delightful high relief, “Flora.” It comes from the Pavilion of Flora, in the Palace of the Tuileries. The very conventionality of the subject emphasizes the originality of Carpeaux’s treatment. The Goddess of the Spring is surrounded by a band of dimpled putti, dancing attendance upon her. Whether we like it or whether we do not, we recognize that the relief strikes an individual note. It owes nothing to philo-Hellenism. Carpeaux has treated the subject in a particular manner for one reason only—that is how he saw and felt it.
An equally good example of Carpeaux at his best is furnished by the famous group, “[The Dance],” on the façade of the Opera House in Paris. When it was unveiled in 1869, “[The Dance]” was greeted with a storm of angry protest. Small wonder. What we have come to regard as the great charm of the group—the insistence upon the joy of motion—must have seemed sheer impertinence to an age which regarded a graceful calm as the one end of sculpture. No doubt, Carpeaux’s critics really believed that, in “[The Dance],” Genius, in truth, danced a bacchanal; in their view, he crowned
“The brimming goblet, seized the thyrsus, bound His brows with ivy, rushed into the field Of wild imagination and there reeled, The victim of his own lascivious fires, And, dizzy with delight, profaned the sacred wires.”
The saner judgment of to-day sees that Carpeaux resolved for his generation one of the ultimate difficulties of his art. He showed how marble might be robbed of its specific gravity. In “[The Dance]” it leaps. The sculptor has deprived stone of its essential deadness. His figures live.
J. B. CARPEAUX