ing with his human slayer, and the energy and determination of the
creatures at bay, our thought involuntarily bridges a chasm of four
centuries and calls up the image of the Barye bronzes in which are
displayed the same detachment of vision, the same absence of
sentimentality, the same vigor and intensity if not quite the same
strangeness of imagination. It is manifestly unwise to carry the parallel
very far, yet there is still another touch of similarity in the beautiful
surfaces. Piero's fine, delicate handling of pigment is in the same
manner of expression as Barye's exquisite manipulation of his metal after
the casting, his beautiful thin patines that do not suppress but reveal
sensitive line and subtle modulation. We know little enough of Piero
beyond what his canvases tell us. Of Barye we naturally know more,
although everything save what his work confides of his character and
temperament is of secondary importance, and he is interesting to moderns,
especially as the father of modern animal sculpture, and not for the
events of his quiet life.

[Illustration: From the collection of the late Cyrus J. Lawrence, Esq.

PORTRAIT OF ANTOINE LOUIS BARYE

_From a painting by J. F. Millet_]

Antoine Louis Barye, born at Paris September 15, 1796, died June 25,
1875, in the same year with Corot and at the same age. The circumstances
under which he began his career have been told in detail by more than
one biographer, but it would be difficult rightly to estimate the
importance and singularity of his work without some review of them. His
father was a jeweler of Lyons, who settled in Paris before Antoine was
born, and whose idea of education for his son was to place him at less
than fourteen with an engraver of military equipments from whom he
learned to engrave on steel and other metals, and later with a jeweler
from whom he learned to make steel matrixes for molding reliefs from
thin metals. A certain stress has been laid on this lack of schooling in
the conventional sense of the word, but it is difficult to see that it
did much harm, since Barye, though he was not a correct writer of
French, was a great reader, keenly intelligent in his analysis of the
knowledge he gained from books, and with extraordinary power of turning
it to his own uses. Such a mind does not seriously miss the
advantages offered by a formal training, and it might fairly be argued
that the manual skill developed at the work-bench was in the long run