Pierre-Jules Mêne, a French sculptor and animalière, was born on 25 March 1810 in Paris, France . He is considered one of the pioneers of animal sculpture in the nineteenth-century. As a teenager he worked for his father, a metal turner and already by 1837 he was casting his bronze sculptures in his own foundry. Mêne produced a number of animal sculptures, mainly of domestic animals including horses, cows and bulls, sheep and goats which were very much in vogue during the Second Empire. Mêne specialized in small bronze figures which explains why none of his works exist as public statuary. His work was a popular success with the bourgeois class and many editions of each sculpture were made, often to decorate an increasing number of private homes of the period. Mêne enjoyed a long period of success and celebrity and he is considered to have been the lost-wax casting expert of his time. Mêne died on 20 May 1879 in Paris and is remembered as one of the finest, and certainly the most prolific, animal sculptors of all time.