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• Date: 1881
• Sculptor: Karl Adolph Donndorf
• Medium & size: Bronze group, over life-size, on a granite pedestal.
• Location: Union Square, west side, between 15th and 16th Streets

When prominent politician Roscoe Conkling died in 1888, his friends commissioned a portrait sculpture from America’s leading sculptor, John Quincy Adams Ward, and requested permission from the city to place it in Union Square. The request was denied on the grounds that Union Square was to be reserved for American heroes, and that Conkling was not in the same class as Lincoln, Washington, or Lafayette.

So why was a sculpture of a woman with two small children erected there? The clue is in the pedestal.

The four sides of the granite base had lions’ heads that dispensed water. Drinking cups attached by chains allowed passersby to quench their thirst. The lack of hygiene may make us shudder today, but in the era before bottled water, such public fountains were considered useful amenities. Not surprisingly, they were promoted by advocates of temperance such as William Earl Dodge: the pedestal of his portrait sculpture originally had a drinking fountain as well. Another nineteenth-century drinking fountain, in Tompkins Square Park, is guarded by a copy of Thorvaldsen’s Temperance.

The figure in Union Square represents a cross between two allegorical figures. Temperance usually carries a water pitcher, as does Thorvaldsen’s figure in the photo above. Charity is usually shown surrounded by infants (see paintings by Van Dyck and Bouguereau in this article). The group of figures also hearkens back to images of the Madonna and Christ Child with the young St. John the Baptist: see Leonardo’s and Raphael’s versions.

The sculpture and pedestal were donated by philanthropist Daniel Willis James (1832-1907), who transformed Phelps, Dodge & Co. into a major producer of copper, with the help of his cousin William Earl Dodge, whose sculpture stands in Bryant Park. Like Dodge, James was a major charitable donor, and he hoped this work “shall be the means of kindling in any heat that spirit of love – Charity – it is intended to illustrate.” In guidebooks, this sculpture is known as the James Fountain, Charity, or the Union Square Drinking Fountain. It’s the gentle side of Union Square.

Karl Adolph Donndorf (1835-1916) was a student of Ernst Rietschel in Dresden. After Rietschel’s death, he and Gustav Adolph Kietz completed the monumental tribute to Luther in Worms, Germany. For the James Fountain, Donndorf used his own family as models.

More

• Fifty years after the James Fountain was erected, tastes in sculpture had changed radically – among New York’s elite, at least. The Armory Show of 1913 introduced “Modern Art” to Americans (see this post). In 1929, Abby Rockefeller founded the Museum of Modern Art: non-representational art was what the Cool Kids loved. Mildred Adams, writing for the New York Times in 1931, commented on the sculptures at Union Square, including Washington, Lincoln, Lafayette, and Charity:

an unnamed woman with two children on the western edge. On the park plan she is called simply ‘bronze group,’ and that is what she looks like. All of them make one feel singularly hot and uncomfortable as they stand out in the midday sun, silhouetted against signs with no proper setting and nothing to do. The traffic speeds and jerks and hoots beside them, and they have no relation to it, no kinship with taxi drivers in greasy shirts and bare-armed truckmen swearing at limousines. They do not even afford shade in which a tired workman may sleep, and one may, at the risk of offending the act defining treason, even doubt whether they are ornamental.

Mildred Adams, “Orphaned Statues of Our Parks: Erected by Private Organizations Which Accept No Responsibility for Their Upkeep, They Fall into Decay or Suffer Sadly from Soot and Weather,” New York Times 8/30/1931

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