Peasant Woman with her Child

A convinced republican, Dalou fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune and was invited by Gustave Courbet, who had become the head of the city’s museums, to take the post of curator of sculpture at the Louvre. After the fall of the Commune, he was obliged to flee to England and condemned to life imprisonment in his absence. In his English period, the sculptor produced large terracotta works in which his virtuoso technique is placed in the service of consistent realism.