The Dance

In 1865 Napoleon III's fine-arts administration handed out four stone groups for the front of Charles Garnier's new opera house in Paris, one to each of four sculptors, and the brief was specific. Three figures, about 2.60 metres high, in pale Échaillon stone from a quarry near Grenoble. Carpeaux's subject was dance. He spent three years on sketches, with dancers and actresses from the Palais-Royal theatre as models, and what he delivered was a whole ring of laughing nude women spinning around a winged young man who shakes a tambourine, with a small cupid at their feet. For that central figure he is said to have used the body of a carpenter, Sébastien Visat, and the smile of Princess Hélène Racowitza, a well-known society figure. When critics called the group indecent at its unveiling in 1869, the state ordered a more restrained replacement from another sculptor, Charles Gumery. The war of 1870 held up the swap, Gumery died the following year, and his group, finished after his death, has been in the museum at Angers since 1885.