Antoine-Félix Bouré

Antoine-Félix Bouré (8 July 1831 – 8 April 1883), known in his own time as Félix Bouré but sometimes found in modern scholarship as Antoine Bouré, was a Belgian sculptor, best known for his monumental lions. Bouré was born in Brussels as the Belgian war of independence was drawing to a close. He studied locally first under Guillaume Geefs and then from 1846 to 1852 under Eugène Simonis at the Royal Academy for Fine Art, going abroad to complete his training at the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence. In his studies, he followed the same course as his older brother, Paul Bouré. Paul died in his mid-twenties when Antoine-Félix was only 17. Bouré was among the artists whose work was exhibited at the Musée Bovie, a grand maison built by the painter Virginie Bovie on the Rue de Trône, Brussels. In 1868, he was one of sixteen co-founders of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts, an avant-garde society that provided exhibition space alternative to that of the official Salon in Belgium. The manifesto of the society espoused the Realist principle of "free and individual interpretation of nature" along with avant-gardist ideals of "struggle, change, freedom, progress, originality and tolerance" that were inspired by Courbet and Baudelaire. "Modernity" and "sincerity" were keywords. By 1875 the Salon had come to accept and then coopt the Realist program, at which time the society disbanded. Bouré was a friend of Auguste Rodin, who worked on a number of projects in Brussels throughout the 1870s. In 1877, Bouré was one of two Belgian sculptors who offered testimony on behalf of the 36-year-old Rodin during a controversy over The Vanquished, a life-sized male nude modeled after a Belgian soldier that was later retitled The Age of Bronze. Rodin had been accused of assembling the work from plaster casts rather than modeling it from life; Bouré confirmed Rodin's work methods from his own observations in the studio. Bouré's sculptures were considered remarkable for their combination of grace and power.