Antoine-Louis Barye (September 24, 1796 - June 25, 1875) was a French painter and sculptor of the Romantisme.
He was born in Paris. Like many of the sculptors of the Romantic Period he began life as a goldsmith. After studying under Francois-Joseph_Bosio, the sculptor, and Antoine-Jean Gros, the painter, he was in 1818 admitted to the École des Beaux Arts. But it was not till 1823, when he was working for Fauconnier, the goldsmith, that he discovered his real bent from watching the wild beasts in the Jardin des Plantes, making vigorous studies of them in pencil drawings worthy of Delacroix and then modelling them in sculpture on a large or small scale.
In 1831 he exhibited his "Tiger devouring a Crocodile", and in 1832 had mastered a style of his own in the "Lion and Snake." Thenceforward Barye, though engaged in a perpetual struggle with want, exhibited year after year these studies of animals--admirable groups which reveal him as inspired by a spirit of true romance and a feeling for the beauty of the antique, as in "Theseus and the Minotaur" (1847), "Lapitha and Centaur" (1848), and numerous minorworks now very highly valued.
Barye was no less successful in sculpture on a small scale, and excelled in representing animals in their most familiar attitudes. As examples of his larger work we may mention the "Lion of the Column of July," of which the plaster model was cast in 1839, various lions and tigers in the gardens of the Tuileries, and the four groups--"War, Peace, Strength, and Order" (1854).
In 1852 he cast his bronze "Jaguar devouring a Hare." The fame he deserved came too late to the sculptor. He was made professor at the museum in 1854, and was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1868.
The mass of admirable work left to us by Barye entitles him to be regarded as the greatest artist of animal life of the French school, and as the creator of a new class of art which has attracted such men as Emmanuel Frémiet, Peter, Cain, and Gardet, who are regarded with justice as his worthiest followers.