Jean-Pierre Dantan (28 December 1800, in Paris – 6 September 1869, in Baden-Baden), known as Dantan the Younger, was a French portrait sculptor. His subjects include many famous figures from the realms of politics (for example, Talleyrand, William Douglas-Hamilton), music and the arts (Beethoven, Paganini, Verdi, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz), and literature (Victor Hugo, Balzac). He is said to be the inventor of the sculptural caricature.

He was born in Paris, where his father was a wood carver, and Dantan's first teacher. His elder brother Antoine-Laurent ("Dantan the Elder", 1798–1878) was also a sculptor. The Dantans are sometimes confused in the literature. Indeed, they both entered the studio of François-Joseph Bosio, at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, at the same time in 1823.

From the perspective of the art world of the time, Antoine-Laurent was the more talented brother. He won the Prix de Rome in 1828 and began a successful career producing officially commissioned, academic sculpture. Although gaining less official recognition than his brother's, Jean-Pierre's work gained a following among the intelligentsia, and is better remembered today, as well as being more influential on other artists, having inspired, in particular, Honoré Daumier.

Both brothers are buried in the family plot in Père Lachaise Cemetery (Division IV) in Paris. The tomb is decorated with relief medallions by Antoine-Laurent (of Dantan père and of Jean-Pierre) and by Jean-Pierre (of Antoine-Laurent and of Mme Dantan).

In a later generation, his nephew Édouard Joseph Dantan (1848–1897) knew some success as a painter, but is now remembered only as a minor artist.

Antoine-Laurent was capable of large scale historic and figure sculpture, but Jean-Pierre's talents were better suited to portraiture, and to a smaller scale. This meant he was less likely to win prizes such as the Prix de Rome, but he was not without success. He exhibited at the Salons, and won a second class medal in 1831. And from very early in his career he had begun to explore the style that would ultimately make him the better-remembered sculptor: the first of his works to gain notice was a portrait bust of the painter César Ducornet in the guise of an accursed poet. Dantan's talent as a portraitist who could add expressive, romantic emotion to his subject was already apparent. (Apart from his work as a sculptor, Dantan was also a capable graphic caricaturist.)

It is for such caricature busts and also statuettes that Dantan is remembered, and for which he received most praise during his own lifetime. During the 1820s he had begun to frequent the salon of Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, and in 1831 he produced a caricature bust of Cicéri. This gained him a certain renown throughout artistic circles in Paris, while his connection to Cicéri eventually gave him access to the salon of the Princesse de Belgiojoso. The members of de Belgiojoso's circle included Italian revolutionaries, political radicals, and prominent members of the European artistic intelligentsia. From this milieu, Dantan began to receive many requests, either for original caricatures or for casts of busts he had already made. For example, in an 1835 letter to Madame Hanska, Balzac speaks with pride of Dantan's caricatures of himself (there were two).

A frequent feature of Dantan's caricatures was the inclusion of a rebus on the socle, allowing the identity of the subject to be made out. In the illustration of the bust of Hugo, an axe (une hache, which sounds like the name of the letter H in French), the letters UG, and some crossed bones (des os, where os is pronounced "O" in the plural) are visible, spelling "HUGO". The rebus for the bust of the actor Pierre-Frédéric Achard was a letter A on a chariot (char).