Frederick William MacMonnies

The Medallic Art Company, New York

Sotheby Parke Bernet New York, September 29, 1977, lot 34 (consigned by the above)

Wolf Family Collection No. 0174 (acquired from the above)

New York, The Equitable Life Assurance Society, The Medallic Art Collection of Bronzes, 1976, no. 61

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1985-90 (on loan)

Denver, Denver Art Museum, 1990-2023 (on loan)

Albert TenEyck Gardner, American Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1965, pp. 82-83, illustration of another cast

Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America, 1968, p. 422

The Detroit Institute of Art, The Quest for Unity: American Art Between World's Fars 1876-1893, Detroit, 1983, no. 79, pp. 158-59, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., The Arts of the American Renaissance, 1985, no. 50, p. 76, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The American Way in Sculpture 1890-1930, 1986, no. 8, p. 18, illustration of another cast

This bronze was originally conceived in 1889 as a 6-foot-tall fountain figure for the grounds of Ambassador Joseph Choate’s country residence in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, designed by Beaux Arts architect Stanford White. This was one of many commissions that architect White facilitated for Frederick William MacMonnies, himself a Beaux Arts sculptor.

The dynamic yet compact form of this sculpture is informed by the fact that it was initially designed to fit in a fountain niche. Its subject relates to classical antiquity and Italian Renaissance fountain sculpture. Scholars have also traced the particular position of the boy in this bronze to the work of MacMonnies's teacher Antonin Mercié, particularly his 1869 David.