Title
Lion walking
circa 1840
cast post 1875
Artists
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Details
- Dates
- circa 1840
cast post 1875 - Media category
- Sculpture
- Materials used
- bronze
- Dimensions
- 23.0 x 40.5 x 10.3 cm
- Signature & date
Not signed. Not dated.
- Credit
- Purchased 1944
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 7424
- Copyright
- Artist information
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Unknown
Works in the collection
- Artist information
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after Antoine-Louis Barye
Works in the collection
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About
Antoine-Louis Barye was one of the greatest Romantic French sculptors, most famous for his work as an 'animalier', a sculptor of animals. Although an accomplished monumental sculptor, he also created a considerable body of small-scale works and often made multiple casts of his small bronze designs. Barye gave life so vividly to his tiny bronzes, which were filled with direct and vibrant naturalism, that his contemporary, the painter Eugène Delacroix once said of him: 'I wish I could put a twist in a tiger’s tail like that man’. Auguste Rodin, 44 years younger, claimed Barye as his teacher and artistic father. The present sculpture representing a walking lion (on a rectangular base), his head slightly turned towards the left, laid on a naturalist base, is often paired with 'Tiger walking' (acc no 7425), whose head is turned toward the right.
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Exhibition history
Shown in 3 exhibitions
The Decorated Wall, Elizabeth Bay House, Elizabeth Bay, 18 Mar 1981–30 Apr 1981
Salon and Academie: the charm of tradition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Nov 1984–May 1985
The Lady and the Unicorn, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 10 Feb 2018–24 Jun 2018
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Bibliography
Referenced in 7 publications
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Arsene Alexandre, Les artistes célèbres – A L Barye, Paris, 1889, p 63, illus p 33.
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Roger Ballu, L'oeuvre de Barye, Paris, 1890, p 162, no 45, illus p 30.
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Renée Free, Art Gallery of New South Wales Quarterly, 'Late Victorian, Edwardian and French sculptures', Sydney, Jan 1972, pp 646–63: illus p 655.
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Stuart Pivar, The Barye Bronzes A Catalogue Raisonné, Woodbridge, 1974, pp 32, 40, 264, 279, no A48, illus p 131. 1990 reprint (pp 54, 282, 297, no A48, illus p 147).
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Michel Poletti and Alain Richarme, Barye: catalogue raisonné des sculptures, Paris, 2000, pp 187–89, no A61, col illus p 187.
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Anna Waldmann, Renée Free and Nicholas Draffin, Salon and Académie: the charm of tradition: a catalogue of nineteenth-century European salon works, Sydney, 1984, p [50], illus p [50].
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Annual report of the Trustees of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales for the years 1944–45, Sydney, 1946, pp 4, 13.
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