Elk Attacked by a Lynx,

ca. 1841

Animal painting (and, to a lesser extent, sculpture) was a well-developed genre in ancien régime France, but it was primarily concerned with the royal and noble pursuit of hunting. Barye was innovative because he studied and sculpted more exotic animals, imagined tableaus that show these beasts’ struggle for life, and made the scenes available to a wide clientele in the form of small bronzes. The elk and lynx could be found in Scandinavia and Russia; the animals might have been known to Parisians from books or zoos, but the battle to the death, in which the small lynx seems to be getting the better of the much larger elk, has a raw immediacy thanks to Barye’s keen imagination as well as a fierce beauty due to his masterful details of modeling and colorful patinas.