"Surtout de table": Tiger Hunt

One can imagine this hunting scene taking place in the exotic East. This sculpture originally stood on a five-foot-high, gilt-bronze triumphal arch in the middle of the duke of Orléans's centerpiece. Three Indians, perched in the box-like howda, defend themselves from a tiger clawing its way up the elephant's back. The driver, riding on the elephant's neck, is about to strike the tiger with his barbed goad. A second tiger, already wounded by a spear, seizes one of the elephant's rear feet. Barye derived this subject from various sources, including a 17th-century Persian miniature.

The inscription around the sculpture's base identifies the piece as having been cast by Honoré Gonon and his two sons using the more costly lost-wax process, rather than sand casting. Gonon was credited with reviving this technique, which faithfully replicates the details of the original model.

Inscription

Provenance

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object.

Duc d'Orléans, 1834, by commission; duchesse d'Orleans Sale, Paris, 1853, no. 1; Count Anatole Demidoff [M. Jaunez as agent]; San Donato Sale, Paris, March 22-24, 1870, cat. 1536; Philippe Burty; William T. Walters, Baltimore, February 20, 1872, by purchase [George A. Lucas as agent]; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1894, by inheritance; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.