artnet.com
Search the whole artnet database
 
 
  Services  | The Grove Dictionary of Art

  Research Library groveart.com Artist Biographies
Materials and Techniques
Styles and Movements
 
 

Animalier sculpture.

Term applied particularly to mid-19th-century French sculpture with animal subject-matter. The beginnings of this genre as a significant phenomenon may be located in 1831, when three sculptors, ANTOINE-LOUIS BARYE, C. Fratin (1801–64) and A. Guionnet ( fl 1831–53), all exhibited animal pieces at the Paris Salon. The popularity of such sculpture, and its commercial exploitability through the production of serial bronzes and plasters, induced some sculptors, such as Barye et Cie, to cast and market their own animal statuettes. Antecedents are numerous, but a comparable degree of concentration on animal subjects in sculpture is found only at the end of the 18th century, in the work of the English painter and sculptor George Garrard. Garrard’s animal pieces reflect contemporary concern with ‘improved’ stock-breeding, as well as the involvement with natural history of the encyclopedists. A much publicized debate in 1830 on comparative anatomy, between Etienne Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire and his pupil Georges Cuvier, stimulated widespread interest in zoology, as did the growth of the Paris Jardin des Plantes, where several generations of sculptors studied animals from life. They could observe dissections at the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, where Barye occupied the post of Professor of Zoological Drawing from 1854 until his death in 1875, when he was succeeded by another sculptor, Emmanuel Fremiet.

There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art. To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to www.groveart.com. To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and subscribe to www.groveart.com

 next page of related articles
 next page of related articles
  Reproduced by kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Limited, publishers of The Grove Dictionary of Art.
  © Copyright 2000 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
site map  about us  contact us  investor relations  services  terms & conditions artnet.com | artnet.de | artnet.fr
   ©2009 artnet - The art world online. All rights reserved. artnet is a registered trademark of artnet Worldwide Corporation, New York, NY.  


search artists: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z