Cet article a été publié en français le 15 mai 2009.
Here is the fountain found at the beginning of rue de Rivoli (near Saint-Paul métro).It is one of the few Wallace fountains in the 4th arrondissement.
An interactive map of the 108 Wallace fountains of Paris exists (There are some mistakes but is very useful). There are five of them in the 4th arrondissement. I will translate later into English the posts about the other four fountains.
These fountains are named after Sir Richard Wallace an Anglo-French aristocrat who was born on July 26th 1818 in London and who died on July 20th 1890 in Neuilly (a city in the western suburbs of Paris). That's why in London there's also a Wallace fountain in front of the Wallace collection (a museum which as the Jacquemart museum in Paris shows the private collections of a bourgeois of the 19th century). As a lover of Paris and a philanthrope, Sir Wallace decided to give the city of Paris a network of fountains in an epoch when running water was not readily available.
The website of an organization FWWF (Fontaines Wallace/Wallace Fountains) is dedicated solely to these fountains. There we learn the sculptor was Charles-Auguste Lebourg (1829-1906) and he also worked on the statues of the Hôtel de ville (about which I wrote so many posts).
The statues were founded by the Val d'Osne Company about which I've already written in a post about the metro signs (Val d'Osne Candelabra).
Thank you to Evan who help me in translating this post into English.
This post was published in French onMay 15th, 2009.
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