Getty Museum

[Antoine-Louis] Baryé, Sculpt[eur] animalier

Creator

French Photographer · 1820–1910

MakerLithographerEngraver

> The sun is only the practitioner, M[r]. Nadar is the artist who wants to give him some work. So wrote a critic of Gaspard Félix Tournachon in 1859. Tournachon's nickname, Nadar, derived from youthful slang, but became his professional signature and the name by which he is best known today. Poor but talented, Nadar began by scratching out a living as a freelance writer and caricaturist. His writi

More on Getty ULAN

Date: 1855–1859
Medium: Salted paper print
Culture: French
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Referred to as the "Michelangelo of the menagerie" by critic Théophile Gautier, Antoine-Louis Barye was about sixty when he posed for Nadar. The son of a Parisian jeweler, he studied animal anatomy thoroughly in books, in laboratories, and at the zoo. When a lion died, he and Eugène Delacroix dissected it. Here his stern visage reflects the notably taciturn man who, although he taught drawing, rarely spoke to his students, correcting their work simply by retouching. The overall effect of self-contained if melancholy dignity, of a man who has survived adversity and is beholden to no one, accords well with contemporary descriptions of Barye. His connection with Nadar was probably established through the painters who were friends of both. Barye was seldom photographed, and this image by Nadar, one of the few existing portraits, was later used as the basis for an etching.

View at Getty Museum ↗

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.

Get printable QR codes

Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.

Open this page

See at Getty Museum

Related across collections

Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.