The Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon is showcasing an extraordinary exhibition featuring 180 works that trace the career of Jean Dampt (1854-1945), a versatile artist who was not only a sculptor but also a cabinetmaker and decorator. Running until March 9, 2026, this comprehensive retrospective reveals how Dampt evolved from academic beginnings to refined neo-Gothic and cultivated symbolist styles.
Curated by Naïs Lefrançois, scientific curator of the museum's 19th-century collections, this retrospective opens new avenues for research into the artist's connections with his contemporaries, including Jean-Joseph Carriès, Pompon, and the Parnassian literary movement. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog raisonné published by In Fine editions, which researchers hope will lead to future discoveries, as many of Dampt's statuettes and portraits remain unlocated.
Throughout the Dijon exhibition, visitors encounter numerous representations of Jean Dampt himself in paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Despite his preference for solitude, the artist enjoyed appearing with all the tools of his trade. Dressed in his work smock and leather apron, sporting a Joan of Arc-style haircut, he displays here the sketch for Cupid from "The End of the Dream," emblematic of his production of small figures that established his reputation in the 1890s.
Born in 1854, Jean Dampt could have remained in the fields of his native Côte-d'Or region tending cattle. However, skilled in wood carving as the worthy son of a carpenter, he caught the attention of the Countess of Nansouty, who helped him train at the Dijon School of Drawing. He later attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as evidenced by his academic drawings of live models and classical antiquities, where he presented his reclining "Ishmael."
With his "Saint John the Baptist as a Child," Jean Dampt achieved his first recognition and received a first-class medal. The work was produced in different formats and reproduced on enameled plaques and postcards. This success launched the artist into representing smiling children, sucking fingers, or holding apples. He also specialized in portraits of mothers or elderly women, as seen in "The Grandmother's Kiss." However, Dampt was not his contemporary Carriès, even though their subjects were similar.
Of Dampt's entire career, his symbolist period remains the most fascinating. For ten years, he illustrated the occultist theories of Sar Péladan around lost love and the mysteries of life. In addition to the beautiful chryselephantine statuette of "The Fairy Melusine and Knight Raymondin," which belonged to his patron Martine de Béhague, the exhibition is dominated by the strange "End of the Dream," showing the disappointment of a young girl in love accompanied by a chimera carrying away her hopes.
Dampt loved to define himself as a craftsman, sculpting wood or steel (for Knight Raymondin, for example). He created Art Nouveau chandeliers as well as an imposing bed decorated with roosters, dragons, and angel heads. "Golden dreams to those who sleep without remorse," he inscribed on the canopy in Gothic letters, while poppies appear on the bed's panels to symbolize Morpheus's sleep.
Few people know that the four angels adorning the top of the Sacré-Cœur campanile in Paris are the work of Jean Dampt. In the early 1910s, he designed these winged figures and then entrusted their execution to craftsmen. Later, Dampt created numerous religious or funerary sculptures, including the Virgin (helmeted and defeating the German eagle) at the Belgian University of Louvain and the Victory and Memory monument in the city of Dijon.
Elected member of the Institute in 1919, he was appointed president of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1926, before finally retiring to his Burgundian lands. The exhibition "Jean Dampt. Image Carver" is being held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Palace of the Dukes and States of Burgundy, Place de la Sainte-Chapelle, 21000 Dijon, from November 7 through March 9.
