Challenging perceptions of sculpture and the autonomous artist, this book begins with a critique of the Rodin scholarship, to establish how the selective study of his oeuvre in particular, has obscured our understanding of French nineteenth-century sculpture. Drawing on new archival sources, sculptors and objects, this is the first sustained study of how and why French sculptors collaborated with state and private luxury goods manufacturers between 1848 and 1895. By contesting the false separation of art from industry, Claire Jones’s study restores the importance of the sculptor-manufacturer relationship, and of the decorative, to the history of sculpture.