Jean-Pierre Dantan

Jean-Pierre Dantan (28 December 1800, in Paris – 6 September 1869, in Baden-Baden), 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.

The Dantan family He was born in Paris, where his father was a wood carver, and Dantan's first teacher. His elder brother Antoine-Laurent ("Dantan the Elder", 1798–1878) was also a sculptor. The Dantans are sometimes confused in the literature. Indeed, they both entered the studio of François-Joseph Bosio, at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, at the same time in 1823.

Career 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. The matter might be different if the question is the position of caricature.

Caricature is a comparatively new form. The Oxford Dictionary of Art notes that "political caricature as we know it today emerged in the last three decades of the 18th century" in Britain, where artists such as Gillray learned how to distill the likenesses of kings and politicians into recognizable stereotypes. But the greatest master of the genre was Honoré Daumier in nineteenth century France. This is close to what the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica has to say, but Britannica also notes the importance of Dantan's "admirable portrait-busts" alongside the realistic sketches of Henri Monnier and the low life drolleries of Nicolas Toussaint Charlet in the development of the French caricature towards Daumier. Dantan's natural talent as a portraitist, his skill at capturing a rapid likeness, might nonetheless be representative of a new style of caricature, and even of art, that moved away from just presenting its subject to actively representing, revealing, and perhaps to an extent creating it.

He produced a grotesquely antisemitic 1833 caricature statue of financier Nathan Mayer Rothschild.

If we avoid speculating on the nature of caricature and simply point to examples, then it is clear that Dantan was a prominent exemplar of the caricaturist in Paris, and that his busts and statuettes are good examples of caricature. He may have refrained from much political caricature, but his busts and statuettes were exaggeratedly expressive if not always quite satirical (a statuette of Liszt has the "spiderlike composer take possession of his piano with an inspired air and spindly limbs" and he was a close associate of other caricaturists. Grandville illustrated his catalogue, and he was good friends with the gifted, younger graphic caricaturist, Cham. Dantan had made a caricature bust of Cham, and in his CHAM, sa vie et son oeuvre Félix Ribeyre reproduces a drawing by Dantan of Cham being carried about by his pet dog at the baths in Baden-Baden, which were popular with Parisian society. Ribeyre and Pierre Véron tell stories of Dantan and Cham playing jokes and pranks at Baden-Baden. Dantan's most prominent students were Gustave Deloye and Prosper d'Épinay.

And if nothing else, the five hundred or so sculptures that Dantan made from a detailed documentary of a significant portion of Parisian society in the years 1830-1850. His artistic status has remained somewhat ambiguous, as his work has provoked both positive and negative reactions from critics since his own time to the present. Laurent Baridon, taking into account both the verve of the caricatures and the fatuity of the ever-so-bourgeois "serious" busts, as well as the rather unsophisticated games with rebuses, concludes that Dantan is himself as interesting as a caricature of an artist as he is as an artist.

A recent (late 2009) sale from a catalogue of thirty busts and statuettes by Dantan, was held by Bertrand Talabardon et Bertrand Gautier in Paris. The works were priced from €10,000 to "much more". The sale included thirty caricatures, mostly of musicians, believed to have come from the collection of Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria. For those who cannot afford such prices, works by Dantan can be found in many museums and private collections, especially in France and Britain. The Carnavalet Museum in Paris has the most significant collection.