Fountain Nymph

Fountain Nymph (sometimes mistakenly given the title ‘Woman of Samaria’) was commissioned by Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne (1780–1863)   from the sculptor Alexander Munro, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The statue, which dates from 1865, was originally intended to be the main feature of a drinking fountain erected at the expense of Lord Lansdowne. Such fountains provided safe water and were often provided for the public by wealthy philanthropists. Although he saw Munro’s design, Lansdowne did not live to see the finished statue.

Munro had created an earlier variant of Fountain Nymph for the niche at the base of the monument to Herbert Ingram, the founder and proprietor of The Illustrated London News, at Boston, Lincolnshire, in which the pose of the statue  is reversed and the rather younger nymph holds a small urn. The memorial was erected in 1862 and the statue, which was cast in bronze by Elkington & Co., was added a year later.

For further information about the history of this statue and other versions see B. Read and J. Barnes, Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture. Nature and Imagination in British Sculpture 1848-1914, (exh. cat.), London, 1991, p. 125, no. 37; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 7–8.

Location: South end of Berkeley Square, London, W1