Aime-Jules Dalou
1838-1902

In the late 19 th century, Jules Dalou was considered Auguste Rodin's rival for the title of greatest French sculptor. Born to a glovemaker in Paris in 1838, Dalou was politically active and an advocate of the working man all his life, sympathetically depicting the lower classes in his art. Dalou attended both the Petit Ecole and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, though he felt that the formalist limitations of the Ecole's academic style stifled him artistically. He turned completely against it after failing to win the Prix de Rome in four consecutive attempts from 1861-1865.

Dalou turned in the 1860s to decorative sculpture to support himself. It was while working for an ornemaniste that he became friends with Rodin, who later reminisced: “My first friend was Dalou. He was a fine artist in the great tradition of the eighteenth-century masters . . .” Throughout his life, when Rodin bragged about the speed with which he modeled clay, he said he had prodigiously fast hands “like Dalou and Carrier-Belleuse.”

After the fall of Napoleon III and the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, Dalou became a member of the ill-fated Commune. When that government fell amid brutal reprisals, he was forced to flee to England . He was successful there, sculpting and teaching at the South Kensington School of Art though he never learned to speak English. His works were exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy and, according to art historian H.W. Janson, “combin[ed] acute observation with a Neo-Baroque fullness and dynamism of form.”

In 1879, Dalou returned to France and entered a competition sponsored by the city of Paris . Though he didn't win, the jury liked his design so much that it recommended that the city build it also. The result was “The Triumph of the Republic”, a large multi-figure monument erected in the Place de la Nation. In 1880, another competition was announced for a monument commemorating the Constituent Assembly of 1789. Though it was never built, the competition maquettes were exhibited in 1881. So popular was Dalou's statuette, “ Lafayette ”, originally intended for the monument, that a version was executed in porcelain by Sevres in addition to the bronze. Soon after, he was named to the Legion of Honor.

Dalou remains best known for the works he created gratis in celebration of the workers and their political champions. This love and respect for the workers was reciprocated. Scholar Mary Levkoff tells us of Dalou's funeral in 1902:

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