When the philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace funded the eponymous ingesting fountains for town of Paris in 1872, he collaborated with French sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg, a local of Nantes, to carry his imaginative and prescient to life.
The fountains, designed within the aftermath of the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris to supply clear ingesting water to town's inhabitants, quickly grew to become well-known in France and overseas. The 4 caryatides supporting the dome, sculpted in a ravishing Renaissance type, grew to become Lebourg's masterpiece, representing kindness, simplicity, charity, and sobriety.
At the moment, when strolling round Lebourg's hometown of Nantes, a number of the Wallace Fountains you will spot may appear uncommon to these most conversant in his work. It's because, in 2024, to commemorate the a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the unique design, the tourism company Le Voyage à Nantes commissioned comic-book artist Cyril Pedrosa to reinterpret 4 of them.
Often called l'Évasion, or “The Escape”, the fountains inform the story, in a really comic-like method, of the 4 ladies liberating themselves from the job assigned to them 150 years in the past, by rising bushes to hold the dome, climbing down them, and leaving their statues behind to flee their predetermined position.
