Antoine Louis Barye is one of the three great renovators of animal sculpture, along with Rembrandt Bugatti and François Pompon. He began his career as a chiseller with the goldsmith Fauconnier before turning more specifically to animal bronze following the success of his Tigre au gavial at the 1831 Salon.

His name is associated with prestigious commissions such as the centrepiece for the Duc d'Orléans, the Louvre building site with the figure of La Force, and the monumental centrepiece of Apollon conduisant le char du soleil (Apollo driving the chariot of the sun) for the Péreire bankers. From 1854, he taught comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, where he studied his models on the spot, leaving a vast body of anatomical drawings as well as landscape paintings.