Artists Past and Present

A lion bites into a boar; a bear grapples with its human hunter. Four centuries later, Elisabeth Luther Cary sees the same fierce life in the bronzes of Antoine Louis Barye.

In these essays on artists past and present, Cary begins in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum and follows Barye from a Paris jeweler’s bench to the Salon, where his bronze animals startled viewers with their force and precision. He studied beasts with a scientist’s curiosity and shaped them with a craftsman’s exacting hand—but when the Salon rejected his work, pride drove him to withdraw from its exhibitions, at a cost to his livelihood. Cary’s eye moves beyond Barye to artists including Mary Cassatt, attending to the choices that make each body of work its own. What does it take to make bronze seem to breathe?

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