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Sculptor, born in Paris, France. After being the curator of the Louvre during the Commune, he fled to England in 1871, and taught at the Royal College of Art, working on terra-cotta sculptures depicting family life. His realistic modelling influenced many English sculptors of the time. He returned to Paris in 1880 and realized his ambition to become a monumental sculptor by producing the largest monument of the Third Republic, entitled The Triumph of the Republic (1899), in the Place de la Nation, Paris.

Jules Dalou was the pupil of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and François-Joseph Duret, and combined the vivacity and richness of the one with the academic purity and scholarship of the other. Dalou first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1867, but with the Franco-Prussian war and the 1871 troubles of the Commune in Paris, he took refuge in England, where he rapidly made a name through his appointment at South Kensington.

In England Dalou laid the foundation of that great improvement which resulted in the development of the modern British school of sculpture, and at the same time executed a remarkable series of terra-cotta statuettes and groups, such as A French Peasant Woman (of which a bronze version under the title of Maternity was erected outside the Royal Exchange), the group of two Boulogne women called The Reader and A Woman of Boulogne telling her Beads. For the city of Paris he executed his most elaborate and splendid achievement, the vast monument, The Triumph of the Republic (detail, left), erected, after twenty years work, in the Place de la Nation, showing a symbolical figure of the Republic, aloft on her car, drawn by lions led by Liberty, attended by Labour and Justice, and followed by Peace.

Dalou, who was awarded the Grand Prix of the Exposition Universelle (1889), was made an officer of the Legion of Honor, was one of the founders of the New Salon (Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts), and was the first president of the sculpture section.

On his passing in 1902, Jules Dalou was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.