Pompeiian maiden is evidently one of those which come by day to young ladies not insensible to the sentiment of love.

Edouward Dantan, who was born in Paris in 1848, seemed to come into art as into a heritage. His grandfather, who had been a soldier under the First Empire, was distinguished as a sculptor in wood. His father, the eldest son of the veteran, born at St. Cloud, where he died in 1878, in 1798 became a sculptor in marble and left many remarkable decorative works and statues. His uncle, the younger son, also became a sculptor, and was famous especially for his caricature portraits in clay and bronze, and for his burlesque and satirical portraits in crayon of current celebrities and notorieties. Edouard Danton entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts as a student, and under the mastership of Pils and Lehmann made such rapid progress that in 1867 the Government commissioned him for some important decorative compositions. Two years later he showed his first picture at the Salon, a picture which had somewhat curious adventures. In 1870 the artist had gone to paris to volunteer in the army against the Prussians. He left his studio at St. Cloud locked up. When he returned to the town he found that the studio had been burned down during the Prussian occupation and supposed the picture had been destroyed. Some years after, however, it was by accident found at Versailles, rolled up around a broomstick. It had bene cut from the stretcher when the invaders sacked the studio, and carried off by some soldier who probably intended to keep it, but who afterward, when the Germans evacuated Versailles, forgot it and left it behind.

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Chapter 11 Text

Pierre Oliver Joseph Coomans