Jean-Pierre Dantan
Encyclopedia
Jean-Pierre Dantan Paris
1800 - Baden-Baden
1869 was a French
portrait
sculptor. His subjects include include many famous figures from the realms of politics (for example, Talleyrand, William Douglas
), music and the arts (Beethoven, Paganini, Verdi, Liszt
, Berlioz), and literature (Victor Hugo
, Balzac). He is said to be the inventor of the sculptural caricature.
("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.
From the perspective of the art world of the time, Antoine-Laurent was the more talented brother. He won the Prix de Rome
in 1828 and began a successful career producing officially commissioned, academic sculpture. Although gaining less official recognition than his brother's, Jean-Pierre's work gained a following among the intelligentsia, and is better remembered today, as well as being more influential on other artists, having inspired, in particular, Honoré Daumier
.
Both brothers are buried in the family plot in Père Lachaise Cemetery
(Division IV) in Paris. The tomb is decorated with relief medallions by Antoine-Laurent (of Dantan père and of Jean-Pierre) and by Jean-Pierre (of Antoine-Laurent and of Mme Dantan).
In a later generation, Edouard-Joseph Dantan (1848–1897) knew some success as a painter but is remembered only as a minor artist.
It is for such carictuare 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.
would describe as essentially modern. Commending Dantan's caricatures in L'Artiste in 1839, Gustave Planche mocked Dantan's subjects, whose appetite for notoriety made them commission their own disfigurement in caricature, and then he pointed out how Dantan's works, apparently not very like their subjects, first provoke the reaction, "How horrible!" but then the realization "But it so looks like him!". If the question is Dantan's own status, it would be too much to read into this a pre-figurement of Picasso's
remark about his own portrait of Gertrude Stein
, "Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will." 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 recognizabale 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, his interest in phrenology, and his association via the salons of Cicéri and the Princesse de Belgiojoso with an intellectual elite interested in a new form of realism, a romantic or expressive realism that captured the psychological realities of human life, would have pushed him to a form of caricature that was neither about superficial resemblance, nor about manufacturing stereotypes. Such an "evidently talented portraitist, whose talents nevertheless did not reach the level of David d'Angers, nor the intensity of Honoré Daumier," 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.
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"). He was undoubtedly a direct influence on Daumier, 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 :fr:Jean-Baptiste Gustave Deloye and :fr: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.
That Dantan is a relatively important artist in his own right, and certainly significant in the history of caricature, combined with his extremely high productivity, might provoke the question as to why he is not better known today. Part of the answer is that much of his production consisted of the essentially uninteresting "serious" work. But perhaps more important is the fact that on his death, his much younger wife, Elise Polycarpe Moutiez, 28 years his junior, destroyed many of the moulds of for his caricature busts, as well as much other material relating to her husband. This may have been done to increase the commercial value of his surviving works, or to boost his artistic reputation, but it may also have been done out of some concern for respectability, as she is also reputed to have destroyed any trace of a secret museum of erotic work within the Dantanorama. Whatever the reasons, Dantan's reputation declined into near oblivion until Janet Seligman published a monograph on him in 1957. 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.
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
1800 - Baden-Baden
Baden-Baden
Baden-Baden is a spa town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is located on the western foothills of the Black Forest, on the banks of the Oos River, in the region of Karlsruhe...
1869 was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
sculptor. His subjects include include many famous figures from the realms of politics (for example, Talleyrand, William Douglas
William Douglas
-of Douglas:*William Douglas, 1st Earl of Douglas *William Douglas, 6th Earl of Douglas *William Douglas, 8th Earl of Douglas -of Angus:*William Douglas, 2nd Earl of Angus -of Douglas:*William Douglas, 1st Earl of Douglas (c. 1327–1384)*William Douglas, 6th Earl of Douglas (1425–1440)*William...
), music and the arts (Beethoven, Paganini, Verdi, Liszt
Liszt
Liszt is a Hungarian surname. Notable persons with that surname include:* Franz Liszt , Hungarian composer and pianist* Adam Liszt , father of Franz Liszt* Anna Liszt , mother of Franz Liszt...
, Berlioz), and literature (Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, Balzac). He is said to be the inventor of the sculptural caricature.
The Dantan family
Dantan's father was a wood carver, and Dantan's first teacher. His elder brother Antoine-LaurentAntoine Laurent Dantan
Antoine Laurent Dantan was a French academic sculptor. He won the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1828. He is often confused with his younger brother Jean-Pierre Dantan, also a sculptor....
("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
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts is the distinguished National School of Fine Arts in Paris, France.The École des Beaux-arts is made up of a vast complex of buildings located at 14 rue Bonaparte, between the quai Malaquais and the rue Bonaparte, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Près,...
in Paris, at the same time in 1823.
From the perspective of the art world of the time, Antoine-Laurent was the more talented brother. He won the Prix de Rome
Prix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
in 1828 and began a successful career producing officially commissioned, academic sculpture. Although gaining less official recognition than his brother's, Jean-Pierre's work gained a following among the intelligentsia, and is better remembered today, as well as being more influential on other artists, having inspired, in particular, Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century....
.
Both brothers are buried in the family plot in Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France , though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the...
(Division IV) in Paris. The tomb is decorated with relief medallions by Antoine-Laurent (of Dantan père and of Jean-Pierre) and by Jean-Pierre (of Antoine-Laurent and of Mme Dantan).
In a later generation, Edouard-Joseph Dantan (1848–1897) knew some success as a painter but is remembered only as a minor artist.
Career of Jean-Pierre Dantan
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 carictuare 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
Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri
Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri was a leading French set designer of his era....
, 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
Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso
Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso was an Italian noblewoman who played a prominent part in Italy's struggle for independence. She is also notable as a writer and journalist.-Life:...
. 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
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
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
Rebus
A rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames, for example in its basic form 3 salmon fish to denote the name "Salmon"...
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
Phrenology
Phrenology is a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules...
and of Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, 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
Charles Philipon
Charles Philipon . Born in Lyon, he was a French lithographer, caricaturist and journalist. He was the editor of the La Caricature and of Le Charivari, both satirical political journals....
magazines La Caricature and Le Charivari
Le Charivari
Le Charivari was an illustrated newspaper published in Paris, France from 1832 to 1937. It published caricatures, political cartoons and reviews...
, including Philipon himself, were imprisoned during the reign of Louis Philippe
Louis Philippe
Louis Philippe may refer to:*Louis-Philippe I, King of the French, last King of France*Prince Philippe, Count of Paris, called King Louis Philippe II by some factions*Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans*Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans...
. 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
Passage des Panoramas
The Passage des Panoramas is a roofed commercial passageway located in the IIe arrondissement, of Paris between the Montmartre boulevard to the North and Saint-Marc street to the south. It is one of the earliest venues of the Parisian philatelic trade, and it was one of the very first covered,...
in Paris, where he sold both is caricatures and serious works. He produced a catalogue illustrated by the caricaturist Grandville
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard , generally known by the pseudonym of J. J. Grandville, was a French caricaturist.-Life and work:...
, 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
L'Artiste
L’Artiste was a weekly illustrated review published in Paris from 1831 to 1904, supplying "the richest single source of contemporary commentary on artists, exhibitions and trends from the Romantic era to the end of the nineteenth century."...
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.
Reputation and Influence
Arguably this last consideration, the concern that Dantan was too commercial and too populistic, is among the most fascinating questions about the artist. Most critics agree that he was not a great artist, but his work is an important link in the history of caricature, and even if they are artistic failings, both commercialization and populism are important aspects of the Paris which Dantan's younger contemporary, Charles BaudelaireCharles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
would describe as essentially modern. Commending Dantan's caricatures in L'Artiste in 1839, Gustave Planche mocked Dantan's subjects, whose appetite for notoriety made them commission their own disfigurement in caricature, and then he pointed out how Dantan's works, apparently not very like their subjects, first provoke the reaction, "How horrible!" but then the realization "But it so looks like him!". If the question is Dantan's own status, it would be too much to read into this a pre-figurement of Picasso's
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
remark about his own portrait of Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, "Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will." The matter might be different if the question is the position of caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...
.
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
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, where artists such as Gillray learned how to distill the likenesses of kings and politicians into recognizabale stereotypes. But the greatest master of the genre was Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier
Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century....
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, his interest in phrenology, and his association via the salons of Cicéri and the Princesse de Belgiojoso with an intellectual elite interested in a new form of realism, a romantic or expressive realism that captured the psychological realities of human life, would have pushed him to a form of caricature that was neither about superficial resemblance, nor about manufacturing stereotypes. Such an "evidently talented portraitist, whose talents nevertheless did not reach the level of David d'Angers, nor the intensity of Honoré Daumier," 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.
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
Liszt
Liszt is a Hungarian surname. Notable persons with that surname include:* Franz Liszt , Hungarian composer and pianist* Adam Liszt , father of Franz Liszt* Anna Liszt , mother of Franz Liszt...
has the "spiderlike composer take possession of his piano with an inspired air and spindly limbs"). He was undoubtedly a direct influence on Daumier, 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
Amédée de Noé
Charles Amédée de Noé, known as Cham was a French caricaturist and lithographer. Raised by a family who wished him to attend a polytechnic school, he instead attended painting workshops by Nicolas Charlet and Paul Delaroche and began work as a cartoonist, taking on the pseudonym "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 :fr:Jean-Baptiste Gustave Deloye and :fr: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.
That Dantan is a relatively important artist in his own right, and certainly significant in the history of caricature, combined with his extremely high productivity, might provoke the question as to why he is not better known today. Part of the answer is that much of his production consisted of the essentially uninteresting "serious" work. But perhaps more important is the fact that on his death, his much younger wife, Elise Polycarpe Moutiez, 28 years his junior, destroyed many of the moulds of for his caricature busts, as well as much other material relating to her husband. This may have been done to increase the commercial value of his surviving works, or to boost his artistic reputation, but it may also have been done out of some concern for respectability, as she is also reputed to have destroyed any trace of a secret museum of erotic work within the Dantanorama. Whatever the reasons, Dantan's reputation declined into near oblivion until Janet Seligman published a monograph on him in 1957. 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
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. The Carnavalet Museum
Carnavalet Museum
The Carnavalet Museum in Paris is dedicated to the history of the city. The museum occupies two neighboring mansions: the Hôtel Carnavalet and the former Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau...
in Paris has the most significant collection.