Bear and Man of the Stone Age (1885)

Artist Emmanuel Fremiet (1824-1910)

This statue, along with the Gorilla Carrying off a Woman, came to the Urbana campus by mistake with the purchase of the contents of Lorado Taft’s studio in 1937. After years of being kept in storage and following prolonged negotiations, they were donated to the University in 1959 by the heir of the original owner. On display since then in Allerton’s woodlands, in the Krannert Art Museum, and in a major four-city national traveling exhibition (“The Romantics to Rodin), they have been back on display at Allerton Park since 2016.

Beautifully realized in bronze by the accomplished French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, the two powerful groups represent a standard of late nineteenth-century academic and popular taste that favored works contrasting bestial force with human figures of grace and vulnerability: angry beasts acting in accordance with their animal instincts, victims as well as perpetrators of terrifying violence, statues at once repulsive and sentimental.

When Fremiet first showed Bear and Man of the Stone Age at the 1885 Salon in Paris, it was made of plaster and listed in the official catalogue as Ours et Homme de l’oge de pierre. But to make the deadly serious subject matter wholly unambiguous, as if somehow in the abundance of telling details the story might somehow be misunderstood, the artist imprinted the words “Denicheur d’Oursons” on the statue-literally “Snatcher of Bearcubs from Their Nest.” Besides our original bronze, another cast of the same size is at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, where children enjoy climbing over it.

This is no decorative statue; the tragic scene captures a moment of raw jungle justice in which all participants die helplessly. The cub, a pathetic, humanlike corpse, hangs by a tight noose from the burly trapper’s belt. The trapper’s closed eyes, claw wound, and last gasping breath herald an imminent demise. The furious mother bear, mortally wounded by the heavy dagger thrust in her throat, roars mightily and retaliates in a crushing death squeeze.

Fremiet’s considerable reputation arose from the anatomical accuracy of his works and his attention to archaeological details, his innovative techniques in rendering life-size animal groups, and his successful selling of copies and reproductions. Among his major works are the Wounded Dog in the Louvre, Faun Playing with Bear Cub in the Luxembourg, a gargantuan Elephant in the Trocadero, and the gilt-bronze Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides.

Text from A Guide to Art at the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign, Robert Allerton Park, and Chicago by Muriel Scheinman. Copyright 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission from the University of Illinois Press.