Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875) was the most important French sculptor of the Second Empire, bridging Romanticism and the naturalism that would culminate in Rodin. Born in Valenciennes to a bricklayer father and lacemaker mother, he worked his way up through the Paris art establishment, winning the Prix de Rome in 1854.

Seven years in Rome transformed him. Studying Michelangelo, Donatello, and Verrocchio gave him a taste for dramatic movement that clashed with the stiff Neoclassical tradition still dominant in France. His Ugolino and His Sons (1861), depicting a count devouring his children in Dante's Inferno, announced a new kind of French sculpture: visceral, emotional, and unapologetically physical.

His most famous work, La Danse (1869), created for the façade of Charles Garnier's new Paris Opéra, caused a genuine scandal. Nude figures whirl in a wild ring around a central figure, and critics called it an offense to public decency. Someone threw a bottle of ink at it. The controversy only made Carpeaux more famous. He died at 48, but his influence on Rodin and later French sculptors was direct and lasting. The original La Danse is now at the Musée d'Orsay.