Aimé-Jules Dalou

Born Dec. 31, 1838, in Paris; died there on Apr. 15, 1902. French sculptor.

The son of a worker, Dalou was a student of J. B. Car-peaux. He was an active participant in the Paris Commune of 1871 and was chosen to be curator of the Louvre. He created the terra-cotta statuette The National Guardsman (1871, the Hermitage, Leningrad). After the fall of the Commune, Dalou was sentenced to hard labor for life, but he fled to England, where he worked until the amnesty of 1879. In the works that he executed during this period Dalou supplemented the buoyancy that he had learned from Car-peaux with an interest in the everyday life and feelings of common people (A Woman of Brittany, 1870’s, plaster, the Hermitage, Leningrad).

Returning to France, Dalou completed large, sometimes overly heavy bronze compositions (The Triumph of the Republic, Place de la Nation, Paris, 1879–99). His democratic convictions and his desire to develop a clear, energetic language of realistic sculpture are particularly evident in his thematic reliefs (Mirabeau Replying to the Marquis Dreux-Breze, bronze, 1884, the Palace of Deputies, Paris) and in his 54 figures of workers and peasants for the project Monument to Workers (bronze and terra-cotta, c. 1889–98).