The Politics of the Picturesque: Jules Dalou’s Terracotta Sculpture after the Commune

In 1871, the French sculptor Jules Dalou (1838–1902) escaped into Britain in exile for his participation in the Paris Commune. During his decade abroad, Dalou produced a series of terracotta sculptures of privileged and peasant women reading, nursing, and sewing, before being able to return to Paris where he made his reputation as a sculptor of political monuments. These latter bronze and marble projects, scholars have claimed, represent his “true” legacy, while the terracotta subjects were merely remunerative, intended to appease the taste of Whig aristocrats. Nevertheless, though Dalou left few statements while in exile regarding his politico-artistic intentions, aspects of its effects can be gleaned in his works’ contemporary reception in London, particularly through its frequent critical association with the “picturesque.” Though current use, as critics even then complained, has become so frequent as to be used without specificity, the picturesque was originally an eighteenth-century aesthetic category that referred to specific compositional approaches and sketch-like facture in landscape and painting. Rhetorically exclusionary of sculpture, critics nevertheless recognized in the “rough” handling of Dalou’s terracottas and his use of a material associated with sculptors’ preparatory studies aspects of picturesque aesthetics and its appeal to a democratic audience. A close consideration of the “picturesque’s” positive and negative applications to Dalou’s terracottas, then—particularly in regards to Dalou’s practice and instruction of composing in clay—provides evidence for consideration of Dalou’s British period as a continuation of Communard political desires to address one’s relationship to nature, labor, and society through art.