Lion and Boar

Antoine-Louis Barye is remembered for bronzes of wild animals, yet he also painted, in oil and in watercolour. When he died in 1875, the contents of his studio went under the hammer at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in February 1876, and this little canvas, less than 25 centimetres wide, was lot number two. It carries the stamp BARYE at the lower right, and on the back a seal reading Vente Barye, the Barye sale.

The subject is the one he kept returning to in bronze, a beast bringing down its prey, here a lion pinning a boar. Later the picture crossed the Atlantic. In 1889 its owner James Sutton, one of the founders of the American Art Association, lent it to a New York exhibition of some 450 of Barye's works, held to raise money for a monument to him in Paris. In 1892 the Boston collector William Sturgis Bigelow bought it at auction, and it came to the museum with his bequest in 1926.