Walking Tiger (Un tigre qui marche)
Antoine-Louis Barye
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
While the primal energy of the animal world was one of the favorite subjects of French artists of the Romantic period, the meticulous observation of nature evident in Barye’s animal sculpture owed much to advances in the study of the natural sciences made during the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the century, a cabinet of comparative anatomy was established at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris. Barye pursued his animal studies there, as well as among the live animals in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, where he went to sketch and model from life, sometimes in the company of his friend Delacroix. Barye’s animals, however, are never merely scientific illustrations. Beyond their surface realism, there is an unerring sense of the inner structure based on thorough knowledge of animal anatomy. This is evident in the detailed drawings of bone and sinew and in the moveable skeletal models that he constructed and used in aids to composition. Rodin, who in the 1860s studied briefly and informally with Barye, later observed that Barye’s working method was from the inside out. “I model from the bone up,” Barye told him. Above all, there is the vividness of life in the smallest of Barye’s sculptures.
European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.