
Oliver Cornish
Sale Coordinator for Furniture, Sculpture, Rugs & Tapestries
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£6,000 - £8,000
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Sale Coordinator for Furniture, Sculpture, Rugs & Tapestries

Head of Department
The Barbédienne foundry enjoyed huge success in the second half of the century with Barye's prolific 'animalier' compositions, produced after the sculptors death in 1875 being especially popular. Barye modelled his 'Elephant du Sénégal' shortly before 1865 and the present lot, posthumously cast, probably in the early 1880's, bears the stamp of the Barbédienne foundry. Established in 1838, at its height, the Paris workshop of Ferdinand Barbédienne employed three hundred workmen and produced over one thousand bronzes each year. Large editions of modern and period bronzes, made possible by the development of mechanical scale reduction techniques in the 1830s and 40s, were produced to meet the demand of the growing middle class market in order to decorate their homes.
Related Literature
A. Richarme and M. Poletti, Barye: Catalogue raisonné des sculptures, Paris, 2000, pp. 251-253, A 119.
Pivar, S. The Barye Bronzes, Woodbridge 1981, pp.159, 270, 280.
For a comparable model in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, see Acc. No. S.EX.62-1