Moulding a family business
Among the Tinkertoy scaffold of bones supporting the needlessly beautiful tombstones at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris are (probably) the ones that carried around the man who painted this picture, which was fairly famous even before it became an Internet favourite.
Local boy Edouard Joseph Dantan painted “A Casting from Life” in 1887, when he was 39. That was 10 years before his death in an accident that left him well beyond plaster casts, and 10 years after The Great Rodin Scandal, in which France’s acknowledged master of sculpture was accused of having cast his “Age of Bronze” from life.
(He didn’t; it wasn’t. See this post and the Rodin website for the 19th century’s version of The Great Britney Spears Lip-Synching Scandal.)
Edouard Dantan’s whole family must have been alternatively amused and flabbergasted at the Rodin soap opera. His father and uncle were both celebrated sculptors too, but with a decidedly more relaxed approach to the techniques used, and why not surmoulage — life plaster casts of the model?
Edouard’s grandfather sculpted in wood, his father Jean-Pierre in marble and his uncle Antoine Laurent Dantan in clay and bronze. There’s a fair bit of confusion online about the brothers, and Edouard too, whose name gets several different spellings and whose birthplace is given as either Paris or its western suburb St Cloud, where his father was born.
The confusion carries on right to the grave. The grand “ancient tomb”, as it’s called for some reason, is in Lachaise’s fourth division, where Gioacchino Rossini, Georges Haussmann, Felix Flaure, Ludovico Visconti and Colette, the beloved creator of Gigi, also rest.
The family grave is midway up the entrance avenue at the cemetery.
This photo comes from Appl-Lachaise.net. The grave stone is adorned with weeping caryatids, cherubs with bleating trumpets and four marble medallions bearing the likenesses of “Dantan father & Young Dantan” and “Mrs Dantan & Elder Dantan”. I’m left to assume this means the brothers and their parents, but is this also the final home of Edouard’s bones?
Matthew Innis, who has quite a few works by Edouard on his interesting blog Underpaintings, quotes from a 2002 biography in saying that Edouard was buried in St Cloud, but the same book says he was buried next to his father, and Dad, evidently, is here in Paris.
Most visitors to the cemetery are reportedly seeking Antoine’s grave if it’s a Dantan they seek. Whether older or younger than Jean-Pierre (again, sources differ), he achieved greater celebrity by moulding caricatures of celebrities. But then, according to some sources, including Sotheby’s, that’s what Jean-Pierre did too, and Wikipedia says that Jean-Pierre was the more famous. “The brothers are sometimes confused in reference sources,” it adds helpfully.
Jean-Pierre “created” the vogue, in fact, “for small terracotta statuettes, caricatural in style”, Sotheby’s said in 1995 when it was selling “A View of the Rooms at the Salon of 1880″, another painting by Edouard (see it in this post).
In the 1830s Jean-Pierre had a shop on the Passage des Panoramas, the roofed alley of retailers south of Montmartre that’s still full of galleries today. Dantan would likely have been there when the rotundas on which panoramic cityscapes were projected, giving the concourse its name, were destroyed in 1831.
The windows of Jean-Pierre store drew crowds, everyone vying to identify the figurines of the latest newsmakers. It was like a paparazzi gallery, especially when Edouard was old enough to make his own contributions.
“A Casting from Life”, whose French title is sometimes translated as “A Mould from Nature”, is a bit of a spot-the-famous-faces too. Edouard squeezed Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave” and a bust by Donatello into the studio clutter, as well as “Portrait of a Woman” by Francesco Luarana, who worked from plaster casts in the 15th century.
The painting created a sensation at the 1887 Salon, and that was nothing new for Edouard.
Edouard had his inevitable flying start in art, entering the Ecole des Beaux Arts at age 16 and learning from the best academic painters in the land. The government was quick with commissions for him.
His supreme skill was with interiors, and studio interiors in particular, but this painting, “Fastening the Nets” from 1885, shows he was no slouch with dramatic landscapes either.
In 1869 Edouard made a triumphant debut at the grand Paris Salon with “Episode in the Destruction of Pompeii”, a picture that vanished from his St Cloud studio the following year after Edouard had trooped off to Paris to join the fight against the beseiging Prussians. The Prussians were in St Cloud, meanwhile, burning his studio down, along with the rest of the village.
The painting was presumed lost, only to turn up several years after at Versailles, rolled around a broomstick. Evidently the ransacking soldier who fancied it had carried it there, then abandoned it during the Prussian evacuation.
“First Night at the Comedie Francaise”, 1885
“My Father’s Studio”
At any rate, Edouard’s fame and fortune multiplied with medals at the Salon and elsewhere and more sales to the state, several of his paintings going straight to the Luxembourg Museum, the greatest honour of all.
What’s going on in “Phrosine and Mélidore” from 1878? Some years earlier Edouard had painted a monk in the process of creating a sculpture and it was a tie-in with his grandfather. Is the lusty monk here supposed to be Grandad?
“Phrosine and Mélidore” had been an epic poem by PJ Bernard, for which Pierre-Paul Prud’hon later did the celebrated illustration shown below, and an opera by Etienne-Nicolas Méhul (hear the overture on YouTube), and Honoré Daumier did a quick graphic rendition, subtitled “The Kiss”, not nearly so risque as Prud’hon’s.
There was even a movie version in 1900, but given those antique silents, it was probably no more edifying than the snippets available online: “the tragic consequences of a love affair thwarted by blind jealousy” and “a variant of the Hero and Leander myth”. You can download it in French; if anyone does, let me know if there’s a monk in it.
On July 8, 1878, the New York Times reported that Edouard Joseph Dantan had been killed the day previous by being thrown from his carriage when the horse bolted. His wife, who’d so often watched him fashion legs from plaster, had both of her legs broken in the accident.
