His subjects include many famous figures from the realms of politics (for example, Talleyrand, William Douglas-Hamilton), music and the arts (Beethoven, Paganini, Verdi, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz), and literature (Victor Hugo, Balzac).

He won the Prix de Rome in 1828 and began a successful career producing officially commissioned, academic sculpture.

[1] And from very early in his career he had begun to explore the style that would ultimately make him the better-remembered sculptor: the first of his works to gain notice was a portrait bust of the painter César Ducornet in the guise of an accursed poet.

This gained him a certain renown throughout artistic circles in Paris, while his connection to Cicéri eventually gave him access to the salon of the Princesse de Belgiojoso.

Such games with "codes" would have enhanced the "counter cultural" effect of the works, in a society where caricature was an important political tool.

Dantan appears to have been influenced both by the theories of phrenology and of Romanticism, with its emphasis on expressiveness, so he may have aimed as much to depict the true essence of his subjects as much as their exact physical semblance, and the small scale of his works would have emphasized this, allowing him greater freedom in the handling of his materials.

[1] In fact, however, unlike comparable artists such as Daumier and David d'Angers, Dantan did not risk really engaging with the political issues of his time.

This was a commercial venture, and Dantan produced hundreds of busts, modelled on a small scale (20 to 60 cm high), and available in plaster and bronze editions for relatively low prices.

If the question is Dantan's own status, it would be too much to read into this a pre-figurement of Picasso's remark about his own portrait of Gertrude Stein, "Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.

The Oxford Dictionary of Art notes that "political caricature as we know it today emerged in the last three decades of the 18th century" in Britain, where artists such as Gillray learned how to distill the likenesses of kings and politicians into recognizable stereotypes.

Dantan's natural talent as a portraitist, his skill at capturing a rapid likeness,[1] his interest in phrenology, and his association via the salons of Cicéri and the Princesse de Belgiojoso with an intellectual elite interested in a new form of realism, a romantic or expressive realism that captured the psychological realities of human life, would have pushed him to a form of caricature that was neither about superficial resemblance, nor about manufacturing stereotypes.

And if nothing else, the five hundred or so sculptures that Dantan made from a detailed documentary of a significant portion of Parisian society in the years 1830-1850.

[6] That Dantan is a relatively important artist in his own right, and certainly significant in the history of caricature, combined with his extremely high productivity, might provoke the question as to why he is not better known today.

But perhaps more important is the fact that on his death, his much younger wife, Elise Polycarpe Moutiez, 28 years his junior, destroyed many of the moulds of for his caricature busts, as well as much other material relating to her husband.

[12] His artistic status has remained somewhat ambiguous, as his work has provoked both positive and negative reactions from critics since his own time to the present.