We perform a chiral extrapolation of the baryon octet and decuplet masses in a relativistic formulation of chiral perturbation theory. A partial summation is assumed as implied by the use of physical baryon and meson masses in the one-loop diagrams. Upon a chiral expansion, our results are consistent with strict chiral perturbation theory at the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order. All counter terms are correlated by a large- operator analysis. Our results are confronted with recent results of unquenched three-flavor lattice simulations. We adjust the parameter set to the pion-mass dependence of the nucleon and omega masses as computed by the BMW Collaboration and predict the pion-mass dependence of the remaining baryon octet and decuplet states. The current lattice simulations can be described accurately and smoothly up to pion masses of about 600 MeV. In particular, we recover the recent results of the HSC without any further adjustments.