Quick Facts
Biography
Étienne Dantoine, also Etienne d'Antoine, (February 24, 1737 – March 23, 1809) was a French sculptor.
Born in Carpentras, Dantoine traveled to Marseille in 1747 and studied drawing and sculpting at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture while apprenticed to a potter. After a stay in Rome where he won a Prix de Rome, he returned to France and sculpted the funeral monument of Bishop Inguimbert (1774), which was placed in the choir of the chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu of Carpentras. He then received an annuity granted by the city of Montpellier to execute for them a fountain of The Three Graces (1776) in Place de la Comédie. He then moved to Paris where he married and returned to Marseille. Misfortunes soon hit the artist: his wife died, and the city of Montpellier stopped paying him his pension. In 1799 he was admitted to the Académie de Marseille. Dantoine executed exhibitions between 1800-1803 with a draft public monument representing Languedoc in the form of a connecting Engineering Ocean and the Mediterranean, an allusion to the channel and the two seas. He also presented a globe of the world upon which Justice, Wisdom and Prudence presided. In 1806 he sculpted the cenotaph of General Desaix, consisting of a marble urn on the top of a granite column, which now resides at Château Borély.