Jean Dampt is reborn in Dijon

Dijon (Côte-d’Or). The name of Jean Dampt (1854-1945) regularly came to the attention of the curious, for example in 2018 in the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay entitled “In colors. Polychrome sculpture in France, 1850-1910” or, in 2022, in the book by Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond Martine de Béhague, an esthete during the Belle Époque (ed. Flammarion). However, this prolific artist remained unknown to our contemporaries until this first retrospective dedicated to him. Recipient of a major donation from the artist which he exhibited in 1939, the Museum of Fine Arts of Dijon has maintained his memory by enriching and presenting the most important works of the collection and this fund has enabled researchers to address this or that point in his career. But this was no longer enough and Naïs Lefrançois, in charge of the 19th century collections, undertook in-depth work three years ago, the culmination of which was the chrono-thematic presentation of nearly 200 objects and documents as well as the writing of a book enriched with the first catalog raisonné of the work.

Art in Everything

The exhibition presents a romantic character, from the little boy who, like Giotto, learns about art while tending the cows (a sculpted cane dates from this period) to the elegant theosophist fascinated by the Middle Ages, including the academic sculptor representing touching children, kneeling saints and dancing bacchantes. Member of the Art in Everything movement, which advocated equality between the fine arts and the decorative arts, the son of a carpenter exhibited at the Salon of 1896 “The Bed of Hours”, with neo-Gothic architecture and decorated with sculptures. He slept there until 1939. At the turn of the century, Dampt was a symbolist: this was the time when he created for Martine de Béhague the room of the Knight of the Ideal where the bust of the patron appears in particular under the title Reflection (1897) and, on the wall, the bas-relief of Knight of the Ideal riding a hippogriff above Paris (1902-1906). After the First World War, during which he sculpted Rooster “Long live France” (1915), he designed memorials to the dead and collaborated on that of Dijon for which he imagined several allegories. He has cultivated this genre since the end of the 19th century (Peace at home1898-1900) and developed it in funerary monuments, notably that of his parents (Pain1905). After having deployed his imagination to illustrate the legends of the Middle Ages and created an inspiring setting where Martine de Béhague could meditate and attend the concerts and theatrical performances that she organized, he thus softened into a high-quality academicism which he also put at the service of religious sculpture.

The efforts of Naïs Lefrançois made it possible to locate the studio collection and a number of works in private homes and museums. Others will appear, sculpted portraits, decorative objects and perhaps paintings. Knowledge of this important artist will be enriched and the public will now look differently at the 35 sculptures from the Dijon Museum which were restored for this exhibition.