French family of sculptors. Antoine-Laurent Dantan (b Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine, 8 Dec 1798; d Saint-Cloud, 25 May 1878), known as Dantan the elder, and his brother Jean-Pierre Dantan (b Paris, 28 Dec 1800; d Baden Baden, 6 Sept 1869), known as Dantan the younger, both served an apprenticeship with their father, an ornamental wood-carver. Antoine-Laurent entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1816, and Jean-Pierre in 1823. Both were the pupils of François-Joseph Bosio, who passed on to them his skill in elegant, conventional portraiture. While the elder brother was preparing his entry for the Prix de Rome, the younger worked on a variety of decorative commissions. By 1826 he had executed a statuette (Paris, Carnavalet) portraying César Ducornet (1805–56), an armless painter. Because of the subject’s disability, this work cannot rank as the first of his caricatures or portraits chargés, as Jean-Pierre termed his subsequent humorous sculptures; but the interest in physical peculiarities that it displays was in accordance with the Romantics’ desire to accommodate the full range of natural phenomena, even the disturbing.