At age twenty, with eleven francs in his pocket, Pierre-Jean David d'Angers arrived in Paris and began working in Philippe-Laurent Roland's studio. Later, as a winner of the Prix de Rome*, he studied antiquities in Italy, where he met Antonio Canova and absorbed current trends in Neoclassical* art.

Yet, regarding sculpture as "the recorder of posterity," he often tempered the classicizing elements in his work with a vigorous realism. Back in Paris, David d'Angers created a sensation at the 1817 Salon with his monument to the French general, the prince de Condé. The sculpture's contemporary dress and diagonal movement challenged Neoclassical taste, heralding the Romantic* style that David d'Angers later developed more fully.

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