Tiger Bringing a Peacock to Her Litter, Bronze sculpture in Tuileries Garden, France
Tiger Bringing a Peacock to Her Litter is a dark green bronze group on a stepped stone base topped with a white slab. A tigress grips a peacock in her jaws, its long tail feathers hanging down her chest, while three cubs sit and lie below among the dragged plumage. A small rectangular plaque is fixed to the front of the base.
Auguste Cain modelled the group and Ferdinand Barbedienne's foundry cast it in bronze; the work entered the Tuileries Garden in 1884, the year of its inception. It stands in the Grand Carré, the garden's central formal parterre laid out by André Le Nôtre, where it joined the series of animalier bronzes placed under the Second Empire and early Third Republic.
The work shows Auguste Cain's interest in studying real animals, a practice he developed at the Jardin des Plantes. The sculpture reflects a 19th-century artistic movement focused on precise observation and realistic depiction of wildlife.
The sculpture sits in the open Tuileries Garden where visitors can view it freely at any time. The garden has flat pathways and is easily accessible for people with mobility limitations.
The bronze was cast by Ferdinand Barbedienne, the Paris founder whose firm reproduced works by many sculptors of the period. Look at the peacock's splayed tail feathers across the rock-like base, a detail that shows how the casting held the finest modelling of Cain's original. Other versions of the group exist in American collections.
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