Dantan Le Jeune - Bust Of A Child In Plaster - Signed 1837

Bust of a child in white plaster, signed and dated 1837.
Height: 48 cm
(Small accidents). See Photo

Jean-Pierre Dantan, dit Dantan le Jeune (1800 - 1869)
French sculptor and caricaturist
He is the brother of the sculptor Antoine Laurent said DANTAN the Elder (1798-1878), and is renowned for his series of portraits-charges of his contemporaries
Formed first by learning from his father, a wood sculptor, Jean-Pierre Dantan entered the School des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1823 and followed the courses of the sculptor François-Joseph Bosio. He quickly launched, from 1826, in the caricature drawn and sculpted after the admired creation of his statuette representing César Ducornet (1805-1856) under the realistic aspect of a miserable poet.
He produced hundreds of small busts of 20 to 60 cm which were produced in plaster or bronze and sold his caricatures and portraits of the society of his time in a room in the Passage des Panoramas known as the “Dantan museum”.
Grandville, Ramelet and Lepeudry produced a lithographed suite, entitled Muséum Dantorama, for Susse and printed by Aubert and Junca (1835).

These portraits-charges representing celebrities from politics (Talleyrand, William Douglas, Hamilton, Louis-Philippe ...), arts (Beethoven, Paganini, Verdi, Liszt, Joseph-Nicolas Robert Fleury ...) and letters (Victor Hugo , Balzac, the Delavigne brothers, etc.) will be very successful: they are now found in museums in many countries, in particular in Paris at the Carnavalet museum.
These statuettes inspired his contemporary Honoré Daumier for his portraits of parliamentarians kept at the Orsay Museum.
Young Dantan is known to play dominoes. He founded around 1838 and led in his workshop for at least 27 years a club of domino players, who indulge in this game as well as word games.
He is buried in Paris in the Père-Lachaise cemetery (4th division), like his brother, in the family concession decorated by the two brothers with medallions of Dantan father and Dantan young by Antoine-Laurent and medallions of Mme Dantan and Dantan l elder by Jean-Pierre. The artistic lineage of the Dantans continued with the painter Edouard-Joseph DANTAN (1848-1897), known for works such as the Sculptor's Workshop, Un intermission at the Comédie-Française or Un coin du Salon.