Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

Jaguar devorant un lièvre is the first sculpture that Matisse modeled fully in three dimensions. Toward the end of 1899, Matisse attended evening sculpture classes at the Ecole de la Ville de Paris. As he had done in his painting, he decided to launch himself into this new medium by copying a work in the Louvre. He chose Antoine-Louis Barye's Jaguar devorant un lièvre, which had been in the Salon of 1851. Jack Flam supposes that Matisse "sought out a sculpture of a non-human subject in order to avoid confounding the discoveries he was making in painting with whatever he might learn from modeling in clay. The violent subject matter seemed to have fulfilled some inner need for Matisse at this time, when he was experiencing great frustration. While he was struggling to find a place in the artistic milieu of Paris, such contemporaries as Vuillard and Bonnard were forging ahead" (op. cit., pp. 75-76).

Matisse drew numerous studies of Barye's sculpture at the Louvre and even blindfolded himself as he modeled on his copy to increase his awareness of tactile form. To understand the musculature of his subject, he studied a flayed cat that had been prepared for him by the Ecole de Beaux Arts anatomy class and mounted on a wooden plank. He later studied human musculature by copying an écorché, a sculpture of a flayed man, attributed to Pierre Puget.