Private collection, Europe
Private collection, UK

2023: RODIN DALOU, Eros Gallery, 1-22 December.

Amélie Simier, Jules Dalou, the Sculptor of the Republic , exh. cat (Paris: Petit-Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, 2013), reference no. 235.

Aimé-Jules Dalou (1838-1902) was one of only a handful of leading late-nineteenth century French Sculptors, whose reputation was perhaps second only to his contemporaries, Henri Chapu (1833-1891) and Marius Jean Antonin Mercié (1845-1916). Dalou was hugely influential and was a founding member of the Société des Artistes Français and later a founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He was officially rewarded with the highest rank of the Légion d'Honneur two years before his death, with the inauguration of the Triumph of Republic, in 1899.

He started his artistic training in 1852 at the Petite Ecole after being encouraged to do so by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, where he studied drawing and modelling. Carpeaux continued to support Dalou throughout his career and influenced his sculpture greatly. Dalou began employment in the field of decorative sculpture working for two companies in Paris, Lefèvre and Favière goldsmiths. During this time he contributed towards the architectural features of Hôtel de la Païva, the then home of the infamous French courtesan Esther Lachmann known as La Païva.

Dalou's unique approach lay in his broad range of subject, painterly and sculptural source material, though which he absorbed an impressive spectrum of inspiration. The work of an eighteenth-century sculptor, Louis-François Roubiliac, played a significant role in Dalou's artistic development, whose sculptures he studied whilst in London. Dalou's work includes friezes, maquettes, reliefs, and individual bronze figures. He is known for Baroque-inspired allegorical group compositions, as much as for his depictions of the French rural labouring classes. Dalou encouraged students of art to free themselves from the constrainsts of established traditions, with his style and teachings thought to have awakened a new generation of young British sculptors whose work was later aligned to the New Sculpture movement.

As a staunch republican, Dalou was especially captivated by the imagery of the labourer, creating a large number of sculptures and drawings of men and women toiling in the fields. Andrew Eschelbacher writes extensively on this subject within his dissertation, 'Labor in the Cauldron of Progress: Jules Dalou, The Inconstant Worker, and Paris’s Memorial Landscape'. He states that: ‘Dalou was preoccupied with the position and character of the worker. His obsession mirrored that of many in the nation and the western world. In the wake of the Paris Commune, and in the midst of a period when industrialism accelerated changing social and geographical patterns, the unstable station and political role of the male laborer weighed heavily on the psyche of France’. The chief ambition for Dalou towards the end of his life was to create a monument to the workers which he unfortunately never achieved, although he did create many individual figures from terracotta which would have made up this colossal sculpture. Around this time he also started work on his sculpture the Large Peasant.

Other examples of The Large Peasant in this size are held in the following museums; Museum d’Orsay, Paris; Carlsbery Glypotek, Copenhagen; The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The original plaster is in the Petit Palais, Paris.