Jean-Pierre Dantan

Jean-Pierre Dantan, known as Dantan the Younger, was a French portrait sculptor. His subjects include many famous figures from the realms of politics (for example, Talleyrand, William Douglas-Hamilton), music and the arts (Beethoven, Paganini, Verdi, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz), and literature (Victor Hugo, Balzac). He is said to be the inventor of the sculptural caricature.

Antoine-Laurent was capable of large scale historic and figure sculpture, but Jean-Pierre's talents were better suited to portraiture, and to a smaller scale. This meant he was less likely to win prizes such as the Prix de Rome, but he was not without success. He exhibited at the Salons, and won a second class medal in 1831. And from very early in his career he had begun to explore the style that would ultimately make him the better-remembered sculptor: the first of his works to gain notice was a portrait bust of the painter César Ducornet in the guise of an accursed poet. Dantan's talent as a portraitist who could add expressive, romantic emotion to his subject was already apparent. (Apart from his work as a sculptor, Dantan was also a capable graphic caricaturist.)

It is for such caricature busts and also statuettes that Dantan is remembered, and for which he received most praise during his own lifetime. During the 1820s he had begun to frequent the salon of Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, and in 1831 he produced a caricature bust of Cicéri. This gained him a certain renown throughout artistic circles in Paris, while his connection to Cicéri eventually gave him access to the salon of the Princesse de Belgiojoso. The members of de Belgiojoso's circle included Italian revolutionaries, political radicals, and prominent members of the European artistic intelligentsia. From this milieu, Dantan began to receive many requests, either for original caricatures or for casts of busts he had already made. For example, in an 1835 letter to Madame Hanska, Balzac speaks with pride of Dantan's caricatures of himself (there were two).

A frequent feature of Dantan's caricatures was the inclusion of a rebus on the socle, allowing the identity of the subject to be made out. In the illustration of the bust of Hugo, an axe (une hache, which sounds like the name of the letter H in French), the letters UG, and some crossed bones (des os, where os is pronounced "O" in the plural) are visible, spelling "HUGO". The rebus for the bust of the actor Pierre-Frédéric Achard was a letter A on a chariot (char).

Such games with "codes" would have enhanced the "counter cultural" effect of the works, in a society where caricature was an important political tool. But the rebuses also played the simple role of identification, because not all of Dantan's caricature's were immediately recognizable. Dantan appears to have been influenced both by the theories of phrenology and of Romanticism, with its emphasis on expressiveness, so he may have aimed as much to depict the true essence of his subjects as much as their exact physical semblance, and the small scale of his works would have emphasized this, allowing him greater freedom in the handling of his materials.

In fact, however, unlike comparable artists such as Daumier and David d'Angers, Dantan did not risk really engaging with the political issues of his time. This may not be very surprising considering the sort of risk that would have been involved. Writers and artists associated with Charles Philipon's magazines La Caricature and Le Charivari, including Philipon himself, were imprisoned during the reign of Louis Philippe. It is known, however, that Dantan made a bust of Louis Philippe, but it was never exhibited and is now lost, while he had some issues when in London (1833-34) for caricatures he made of the royal family, even though these were relatively harmless.

It may be that Dantan preferred a more reliable source of income than was available on commissions from the artistic and political avant-garde. He had begun in the 1820s making many "serious" portrait busts of the celebrities of the time. This was a commercial venture, and Dantan produced hundreds of busts, modelled on a small scale (20 to 60 cm high), and available in plaster and bronze editions for relatively low prices. This practice was his main activity before he became known for his caricatures, and it remained his predominant output in his later years. This work, however, is rarely interesting to modern eyes.

The better to sell his work, Dantan established a "Dantanorama" in the Passage des Panoramas in Paris, where he sold both is caricatures and serious works. He produced a catalogue illustrated by the caricaturist Grandville, first printed in 1834, which gives a good idea of his output. Grandville's illustrations of the Dantanorama itself make it look a grander place than it perhaps was. Contemporary photographs show a shop sufficiently cluttered to suggest an attitude of "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap" and this attitude was certainly detected by some commentators of the time. In 1835, an anonymous critic in L'Artiste warned the elder Dantan, Antoine-Laurent, not to chase after merchandise, nor after popularity, and to learn from the unfortunate example of his younger brother who had the talent to be great artist but who had abandoned art for a profession, sculpture for caricature, and had prostituted the noble tradition of sculpture.

Dantan died in Baden-Baden, aged 68.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023