Seated Hare - Antoine Barye 1795–1875 - Barbedienne

Period
circa 1870

French School of Animal Sculpture

Provenance
France

Dimensions
Height: 8.2 cm
Length: 4.8 cm
Width: 3.2 cm
Weight: 137 gr.

Signature
Rear right of the base: BARYE

Caster
Left edge of the base: F. BARBEDIENNE

Posthumous casting (between 1880 and 1930)

Numbered beneath the base: 43
(the *Seated Hare* in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Petit Palais bears the number 648).

Material
Bronze proof with a brown patina.

Enigmatic, this Antoine-Louis Barye.

Shuttled away in his studio, he preferred the company of his sketches, plaster casts, and rough models to that of his contemporaries. He spent his life with his hands in clay and wax, his mind absorbed in the study of his models.

He always kept his distance from the events of his time, both political and artistic (except for his election to the Institute toward the end of his life). He did not allow art critics to approach him, unless they were personal friends.
Nor did he leave behind any memoirs, notebooks, or letters.
Under these circumstances, it is difficult, if not impossible, to fathom this personality, as hieratic as the lions he sculpted…

No Jaguar to devour our little bronze hare. But… is it really that far away? Perched on its hind legs, ears pricked, eyes alert, back muscles taut and ready for action, the hare is on the lookout. The danger isn’t imminent, but it must be guarded against…

Even in his most understated works, the savagery and cruelty of nature are never far away, and while here, Antoine-Louis Barye does not express it directly through a scene whose violence left his contemporaries too shocked to appreciate its full force and bravery, it is nonetheless underlying.

“Sculpture has finally found its Lafontaine!” exclaims a talented writer contemporary of Barye whose name we have not recorded. For while he quotes him emphatically, art critic Alexandre ARSÈNE simply forgets to specify his name.

Maybe we shouldn’t hold it against him, and without any hard feelings, let’s allow him, with his usual verve, to have the last word: “Barye, in his intimate menagerie, has tackled nearly every subject and explored every genre, his penetrating observation focused on expressing every emotion. This general impression alone would prove just how little the choice of subject matters in art. The feelings with which the animal statuettes seem endowed—majesty, anger, mischief, gentleness—reside in the artist’s mind and in ours, and not in the models themselves. We say that a dog is intelligent because its movements correspond to our wishes more often than those of other animals. (…). These bronzes, like any true work of art, are mere pretexts.”