DELABRIERRE, Paul Edouard

French sculptor, an important member of the Animalier schoolGLOSSARYAnimalier school or animalier movement was a roughly late 18th century to late 19th century movement and school of art, which took as its subject in various figurative forms the animal kingdom or Kingdom Animalia. The movement predominantly centered around Paris, France, and Italy, with some offshoots in England, Germany, and North America. Some examples of animalier artists and their subjects are George Stubbs and Jules Moigniez (paintings and sculpture of horses), Antoine-Louis Barye (sculpture of bulls and humans), and Rembrandt Bugatti (felines, human figures, and zoo animals). in late 19th-century Paris. He studied art under the painter Jean-Baptiste Delestre (1800-1871) but found his true calling was with the rendering of three-dimensional sculpture. He was greatly influenced by the combat works of the great master Antoine-Louis Barye and many of Delabrierre's combat models show this violence of nature, which was very popular at that time. Many of the sculptures he executed often incorporated figures as well as animals.

Delabrierre first exhibited at the SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. of 1848 and continued submitting works regularly until 1882. His popular, realistic, subjects are very well detailed and finished. The façadeGLOSSARYthe front or principal face of a building, especially one elaborately constructed; a blind façade is a façade that is purely decorative and does not relate to the structure of the building. of the Louvre incorporated one of his largest groups, L'Equitation, in 1857. In the last two years of his exhibiting career Delabrierre experimented with cast iron as a worthy sculpture material for the Salon.