The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Bulletin

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
French, I827-I875
Model for the Watteau Fountain
French (Paris), about I867-68
Patinated plaster
Height, 30o'/8 in. (76.5 cm)
Gift of Yulla Lipchitz, i991
I991.64
Carpeaux, author of the marble group Ugolino and His Sons
(acc. no. 67.250), greatly admired the painter Antoine Watteau
(1684-172 ), like Carpeaux a native of Valenciennes. He
proposed a Watteau monument for the city in i 860, while still
at the French Academy in Rome. It developed into a fountain
with the central figure on a high pedestal, much along the lines
of this model. The pedestal, with infants on each of the corners,
echoes the Italian Renaissance, especially Giovanni Bologna's
Neptune fountain in Bologna. Ernest-Eugene Hiolle completed
the Watteau fountain after Carpeaux's death. The model's
tremulous, even frothy surface quality, appropriate to the
eighteenth-century subject, was diminished in the process. The
original clay model, from which this plaster was made, does
not survive. The Musee des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, and
the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, own polychrome plasters taken from
it, while museums in Lyons and Phoenix have more simply
patinated ones like ours. The existence of several plasters
raises the possibility that they were intended as gifts to the
fountain's commissioners. It must have been the composition's
bold penetrations of space that appealed to the twentiethcentury
master Jacques Lipchitz, whose widow donated it to
the Museum.
JDD
Ex coll.: Jacques Lipchitz, Paris and Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
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