Jules Dalou

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Aimé-Jules Dalou, born December 31, 1838 - died April 15, 1902, was a French sculptor.

Jules Dalou was the pupil of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and François-Joseph Duret, and combined the vivacity and richness of the one with the academic purity and scholarship of the other. Dalou is recognized as one of the most brilliant virtuosos of the French school, admired for his perceptiveness, execution and arrangement. Dalou first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1867, but with the Franco-Prussian war and the 1871 troubles of the Commune in Paris, he took refuge in England, where he rapidly made a name through his appointment at South Kensington.

In England Dalou laid the foundation of that great improvement which resulted in the development of the modern British school of sculpture, and at the same time executed a remarkable series of terra-cotta statuettes and groups, such as A French Peasant Woman (of which a bronze version under the title of Maternity was erected outside the Royal Exchange), the group of two Boulogne women called The Reader and A Woman of Boulogne telling her Beads.

Detail of the Triumph of the Republic, 1889, Place de la Nation, paris

He returned to France in 1879 and produced a number of masterpieces. His great relief of Mirabeau replying to M. de Dreux-Brz, exhibited in 1883 and later at the Palais Bourbon, and the highly decorative panel, Triumph of the Republic, were followed in 1885 by The Procession of Silenus. For the city of Paris he executed his most elaborate and splendid achievement, the vast monument, The Triumph of the Republic (detail, left), erected, after twenty years work, in the Place de la Nation, showing a symbolical figure of the Republic, aloft on her car, drawn by lions led by Liberty, attended by Labour and Justice, and followed by Peace. It is somewhat in the taste of the Louis XIV period, ornate, but with a forward thrust to the ensemble and exquisite in every detail. Within a few days there was also inaugurated his great Monument to Alphand (1899), which almost equalled in the success achieved the monument to Delacroix in the Luxembourg Gardens. Another of his famous works adorns the grave of Victor Noir at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Dalou, who was awarded the Grand Prix of the Exposition Universelle (1889), was made an officer of the Legion of Honor, was one of the founders of the New Salon (Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts), and was the first president of the sculpture section. In portraiture, whether statues or busts, his work is not less remarkable.

On his passing in 1902, Jules Dalou was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.