Édouard Lantéri was born on 1 November 1848 at Auxerre, Burgundy, France. His parents sent him to Paris to study music, but he discovered his vocation lay in the field of figurative sculpture and was trained in his art in the studio of Aimé Millet at the Petite École de Dessin and the École des Beaux-Arts. After spending 18 months mending furniture damaged in the German bombardment of Paris in 1871, he left France to escape civil unrest and settled in London. Due to the influence of Dalou, he obtained a position with Sir Joseph Boehm and would eventually become his chief assistant. Informed opinion in sculptural circles holds that at least two of the four bronze soldiers at the base of the Duke of Wellington Memorial in Hyde Park were sculpted by Lantéri. The naturalistic romanticism of his imaginative groups was quite new to Britain when Lanteri arrived, and the sculptural style he brought from France, far removed from the classicism of his British contemporaries, was influential particularly among the exponents of the New Sculpture. Most of his work was modelled in clay and subsequently cast in bronze, although he was also a skilful carver of stone. After Boehm’s death in 1890, he obtained the position of Sculptor Master at the Royal School of Art, South Kensington (the Royal College of Art from 1896). The appointment was relentlessly mocked in print by the critic Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) as ‘The Dalou-Boehm Job’. Nevertheless, Lantéri speedily established a reputation as an outstandingly popular teacher and, although passionate, evinced none of the histrionics of Dalou, who had a tendency to destroy the work of students with whom he disagreed. The only works Lantéri ever destroyed were his own, due to his driven perfectionism. In high dudgeon, Gosse spitefully expunged all reference to him from his influential 1894 Art Journal essay ‘The New Sculpture’. However, Lantéri’s 1899 class attracted an unheard of 105 students and he would powerfully influence an entire generation of British sculptors. Among his stellar cast of pupils would be Francis William Doyle-Jones; Clare Frewen Sheridan; Alexander Carrick and Charles Wheeler. Francis Shurrock would write of him: ‘Lantéri was more than a teacher, he was an inspiration’. Lantéri exhibited 70 works at the RA in the period 1887-1917, exhibited at the New Gallery in London, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, the Royal Society of Artists in Birmingham and at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. His Beatrice may be found at the V&A, Paysan at the Tate and Landau at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. An insight into Lantéri’s rapport with his students may be taken from Basil Gotto’s memoirs To The Best of My Recall in which he notes the events of an evening in 1903 when members of the Arts Club in Dover Street held a dinner at the Café Royal in honour of Rodin, then staying in London with John Tweed: ‘After many drinks had circulated and many toasts had been honoured, we found that the café was besieged by excited students from South Kensington Art School. The sculptor master there Monsieur Lantéri, a friend of Rodin’s, had evidently enthused them. They seized a four-wheel cab, took the horse from the shafts, put Rodin, George Wyndham and Sargent inside, and with John Tweed on the roof, pulled the lot round to Dover Street, where we all thronged into the Club, which to my amazement, produced a supper as if by magic.’ Lanteri followed his friend Alphonse Legros in producing cast portrait medals, including those of the sculptor Robert Glassby (bronze, 1888) and of Boehm (bronze, 1891). In 1887 Francis Derwent Wood arrived at South Kensington and in time, he would become both Lantéri’s assistant and his successor. In the period 1905-07 Lantéri was one of the sculptors engaged by the eminent architect Sir Aston Webb to execute the sculpture on the southern façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There, he supervised the work of his students, sculpted Fame in marble at the top of the tower near the entrance and executed the figures of Sculpture and Architecture in the niches at the base of the tower. His bronze statuette Ludwig Mond, the bronze medallion Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm (1891), the marble bust Sir Walter Sendall (1902), the bronze plaque Ludwig Mond (1909) and the statuette Sir Robert Ludwig Mond (1912) may all be found in the National Portrait Gallery. His 1912 bronze statue of the German-born industrial chemist Sir Ludwig Mond stands in Ynyspenllch Road, Swansea. His bronze standing figure of Sir Ludwig wears a broad-rimmed hat and overcoat, with his weight forward on his right foot. Both hands held slightly behind back and right hand is leaning on a stick. Left hand holding sheaf of papers. The statue stands opposite the works Mond founded in 1902 as the Mond Nickel Company, now Inco Europe.  Lantéri’s 1913 bronze monument to the industrial chemist and civic figure Sir Samuel Sadler (1842-1911) on its pink marble plinth may be found in Albert Road, Middlesborough. The memorial committe had approached Sir William Hamo Thornycroft, who recommend that they visit a number of sculptors’ studios in London.  In his design, Lanteri strove ‘to represent a genial, lively, hearty, generous gentleman’. Although some of the committee had expressed a preference for a modern frock coat, he insisted on court dress as a way of suggesting Sadler’s knighthood and mayoral robes to indicate his contribution to civic life, in the belief that these were ‘more worthy of the man and at the same time more sculptural’. Lanteri also added a semi-circular wall so as to get rid of ‘the impression so often felt in isolated statues of a pawn on a chessboard to be removed at will.’ Lantéri’s influence endures still. His books Modelling – A Guide for Teachers and Students, Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure and Modelling and Sculpting Animals are still in print. He coined the thoughtful maxim: ‘The artist is nothing more nor less than an observer and he is the greater or lesser artist according to the perfection or imperfection of this power of observation.’ Professor Lantéri died at his home in East Acton on 22 December 1917.