Antoine Barye " Thesée combattant le centaure Biénior " bronze sculpture signed, F. Barbedienne Fondeur
Antoine-Louis Barye 1795 - 1875 -

Thésée combattant le centaure Biénor, Le Lapithe et le Centaure ou Un Centaure et un Lapithe (Title of the plaster model at the Salon) Bronze with green-brown patina H: 75 - L: 68 cm Signed Barye and F. Barbedienne Fondeur sur terrasse Thésée combattant le centaure Biénor subject borrowed from Ovide's Metamorphoses - was commissioned by the State in 1849 for Le Puy.
The plaster cast was exhibited at the Salon the following year. The artist thus returned to the mythology he had adopted at the 1843 Salon with his Thésée combattant le Minotaure (Theseus fighting the Minotaur), a work rejected by the jury. By 1850, the work was a complete success, and Barye exalted the tensions and dynamic oppositions characteristic of his Romantic vision. The original group of Theseus fighting Biénor was almost one meter thirty high. Only five life-size proofs, executed during the artist's lifetime between 1857 and 1875, are known to exist. Given the success of this work, Ferdinand Barbedienne (1810-1892) produced four reductions, the first measuring 95 cm, the second 75 cm, the third 55 cm and the fourth 41.5 cm. The work has become one of Barye's most emblematic, and was chosen to top the monument to the artist erected in Paris. Bibliography Michel Poletti and Alain Richarme, Barye Catalogue raisonné des sculptures, Gallimard 2000, no. F33 pp. 109, 110. Pierre Kjellberg, Les Bronzes du XIXe, Éditions de l'Amateur, 1989, p.61. Stuart Pivar, The Barye Bronzes, Antique collectors' club, 1974, p.69 n° F21. The model can be dated to between 1876 and 1893, and there is a reference in the Barbedien catalog to this period. The same model and size in the Cholet museum.