From the impressive 17th century bronze dog of Bartholomé le Prieur to the 18th century paintings of Desportes and Oudry and the famed Marly Horses of Coustou, animals never been neglected in French art. But in the Paris Salon of 1831 when Antoine Louis Barye exhibited his first animal sculpture, one zealous French art critic dubbed him an Animalier: a maker of animals. The species deprived of human nobility. It was hardly a flattering title. It was one thing to show animals as part of the total composition; it was an entirely different matter to portray them as individuals. This was in direct contrast to the classical teachings of the day, which stressed the adulation of human body, and it was in keeping with the prevalent romantic interest in exotic beasts and he returned to nature. Barye’s animals, and the animals of many other artists who followed Barye’s example, became the symbols of the artistic freedom found in the new Romantic movement. Chains or human restraint free themselves, unshackled the animals. They were portrayed realistically sometimes so much, they were to brutal for the faint of heart of those accustomed to the usual, but exceedingly uninteresting classical sculpture of the Salons.

Barye was a perfectionist. From his father, a jeweler, and from his younger years as an apprentice in the jewelry trade, Barye learned the importance of perfection, form and decoration in art. As journeymen, he mastered the techniques of melting testing of metals. This knowledge proved invaluable when he turned to his real interest of modeling. But not contend with is a superficial representation of the figures he modeled, Barye, as did many of his contemporaries spend a great deal of time in such places as the dissecting rooms of the medical colleges: sketching, drying and sharpening his skill in anatomy. In the Jardin des Plantes, that great Park in Paris, he studied the live animals in the zoo, their movements, personality, and idiosyncrasies. In the Museum of Natural History, he studied the dead but exotic stuff animals and, as a matter-of-fact; he became so proficient as an anatomist that in 1854, when he was firmly established as a sculptor, he was appointed professor of zoological drawings at this museum.

Barye worked with one of the best founders of century, Honoré Gonon, with whom he produced many castings in cire-perdue, but also explored many other less costly techniques. After Gonon died in 1838, Barye canvas on founder and in 1839 was licensed as a bronzier. Barye was remarkable in this era and then he excelled in every step make a bronze statue: molding, casting, chasing and patinating. Almost all of Barye’s work from 1840-18 50 were entirely of his own hand, a unique accomplishment and history of 19th-century sculpture.

Barye, as many of the Animaliers who followed him, strode to capture in a bronze both inner vitality as well as outer appearance, to give life and death to the subject. For some, like Peter Christie, and avid collector of Barye, and his father before him, an important London dealer in Animalier bronzes, Barye was "the finest sculptor of his time, the master, the father of the Animaliers school who lay the foundations for that great dramatic changes that sculpture was to experience in the 19th and early 20th centuries." He was our great glory, "Rodin once admitted, "and we shall have to depend upon him in coming generations."

Barye's animals varied from the ferocious and tame to the unusual. His most popular model however was Le Cheval Turc, his Turkish horse that captured so completely, and around, the Romantic spirit found in paintings of Arab horseman by Delacroix done about the same time. Barye was also a fine modeler of human figures, which are often included with his animal groups.

Barye and Theodore Gechter were born in the same year, studied with the same masters, Bosio and Gros, but even though Gechter did some remarkable equestrian groups and his animal studies, he chose, as many of his contemporaries, to follow the prevailing academic climate. This was not the case, however, with Christophe Fratin whose art is completely Romantic both in spirit and in form.

Although capable of executing dramatic and often brutal hunting scenes, Fratin often humanized rather than naturalized. Fratin’s animals are relaxed compositions. Every detail is always anatomically correct in every way and his bronzes were made to be viewed as part of the whole. It was a total effect, the picture, which concern Fratin more than anything else.

A different individuality emerges from the œuvre of Pierre Jules Mène who sought realism tempered with truth. Mène was able to capture a fleeting moments, an expression, Camut, a personality, and his animal studies, especially of horses and dogs became true portraits. Hunting scenes were particularly popular in England and Mène produced many variations for the British market.

Jules Moigniez, who specialize in game birds and hunting dogs was very much involved in England, after his resounding success at the great exhibition of 1862 in London, where he won a metal, he exported over half his works to Great Britain.

However, even though the Animalier business was breast, the Animaliers themselves were still not held in very high esteem. Frémiet had hoped to be remembered as a sculptor of important monuments and certainly his equestrian groups excel, probably not so much for the rather stereotype writers, as for their wonderful, spirit horses. Fremiet's "fantasy" sculptures which he casts and became very popular to his dismay and caused one art critic in 1895 to comments that "Monsieur Frémiet passes place among the modelers who busy themselves characterizing in the humility or the arrogance of their gait, the tranquil animals of the hearth or the heroic wild beasts." The same critic also praised those artists for "limiting the scale of their works to the proportions of our dwellings."

Many Animaliers, including Boyer Ruille, Lenordez, Isadore Bonheur and the English sculptor John Willis Good specialize in horses. Isadore Bonheur was one of four children of Raymond Bonheur, a landscape here and drawing master in Bordeaux. All four children became artists who specialize in animal subjects. Isidore’s racehorses, with or without jacks, became very popular and executed many different models. His sister, Rosa Bonheur, became a very famous painter of animals. Her a few sculptures were of cattle and farmyard animals for which he attained a skill close to perfection. Other artists who specialize in working animals included Pierre Rouillard, Fritz Zimmer and to some extent Auguste Cain. Cain the son-in-law of Mène was very popular in his time and was just as adept in modeling a humble donkey as he was with a proud lioness and her cub, the subject also favored by Auguste Dion and Honoré Burgas.

As Animalier sculpture became very popular during the latter half of the 19th century, the number of Animaliers increased dramatically. Some produced beautiful bronzes, but most wasted their talents on overproduction and over diversification.

At the dawn of the 20th-century, any type of Animalier sculpture emerged with the work of Rembrandt Bugatti. Bugatti has Barye before him, also went to the Jardin des Plantes and studied his animals in detail, but instead of capturing them realistically, Bugatti sought to capture a rhythm, a harmony, and an abstract stylization of form. Sometimes he cleverly placed several animals together in order to contrast their movements. Strongly influenced by the Impressionist sculpture of Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, Bugatti created his own distinctive style and if it had not been for his premature death by his own hand, when he was only 31, he probably would have evolved towards Cubism, a foretaste of which can be seen in his later works.

Source: Forrest, Art Bronzes, Schiffer 1988