He came to be valued for works in an academic style which prefigured his 1841 plaster bas-relief La mort de Démosthène (now at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts), or La Villanelle, exhibited at the Salon of 1848 and remarked upon by Théophile Gautier, who described it as
In 1868 Baron became one of the founding members of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts, formed to react against the Belgian version of academicism and to advance Realist painting and artistic freedom.