PRESIDING DIVINITIES: IDEAL SCULPTURE IN ... - Indiana University

W. Benjamin went on to praise Barye’s sculptures effusively, calling them “the most
remarkable works which the art of sculpture has produced since the death of Michel
Angelo.” 13 Earl Shinn too, in his account of the gallery in The Art Treasures of America,
glosses over the Greek Slave as well as Corcoran’s versions of Powers’ busts Ginevra
and Proserpine, while devoting five full, illustrated pages to the work of Barye. 14
Barye’s small bronzes are overtly decorative, serial works of art. Although the
versions commissioned for the Corcoran Gallery by its first director, William T. Walters,
were produced under the artist’s direct supervision, cheaper versions of the same
compositions were available for middle-class men and women to purchase as household
decorations. What, then, secured Barye’s claim to high-art status? The answer is two-
fold. In the first place, Barye worked in an elegant, technically masterful, Beaux-arts
style. The prodigious taste for French paintings in the United States at the end of the
nineteenth century is well-known. In sculpture, too, French style reigned supreme. In
particular, critics admired the active surfaces and lively depictions of gesture and
expression found in French statues. 15 In 1878, the American sculptor John Quincy Adams
Ward advised all aspiring young American sculptors to study in Paris, noting “Paris has
the best draughtsmen in the world; its system of teaching is the best, training the eye to
13 S. G. W. Benjamin, “The Corcoran Gallery of Art,” The Century 24 (October 1882):
818-19.
14 Strahan [Shinn], The Art Treasures of America, vol.1, 16-20.
15 See for instance Theodore Child, “Modern French Sculptors,” Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine 76 (January 1888): 236-66.
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