Art: Waters of ’93

No one who remembers the Chicago World’s Fair—the Fair before the last—in 1893, has forgotten Frederick William MacMonnies’ Columbian Fountain. It was the largest fountain in the world. Its plaster excrescences shone in the palace-girt Court of Honor. All Victorian eyes viewed it with admiration no less for its artistic beauties than because it showed: “Columbia sitting aloft on a Barge of State, heralded by Fame at the prow, oared by the Arts and Industries, guided by Time at the helm, and drawn by seahorses of Commerce. . . . Horns of Plenty pour their abundance over the gunwales. . . . In the basin of the fountainfour pair of seahorses, mounted by riders who represent Modern Intelligence, draw the barge, while babes and mermaids disport themselves in the surrounding spray.”

For modern art lovers the attractions of this fulsome allegory have considerably tarnished. They tarnished even for MacMonnies, who went on to further fame with such works as Manhattan’s Nathan Hale, Civic Virtue, France’s Marne Memorial, before he died. But to the Congress of the United States its beauties are undimmed. Last week Congress passed a bill to authorize the fountain’s reproduction in marble as a Washington memorial to the late, great MacMonnies.

Friends of the sculptor and sponsors who have located the original small-scale model plan to get the City of Chicago and private contributors to put up some $5,000,000 for the reconstruction. Law forbids them to erect it on the grounds of the Capitol or the Library of Congress, and, thanks to an amendment by Congressman John Costello of Hollywood, they will not be able to set it down in the Tidal Basin, or in the reflecting pool before Lincoln’s austere memorial. But there are lots of other conspicuous places in Washington.