Project for a Monumental Fountain

Art Historical Context

Augustin Pajou’s *Project for a Monumental Fountain* (1767) captures the elegant ambition of eighteenth-century French design. Created in pen and brown and black ink with brush and brown and gray wash, the large drawing served as a detailed proposal for a sculptural fountain, a form of public art that adorned royal gardens and city squares during the reign of Louis XV. Pajou, best known as a leading Neoclassical sculptor, used the fluid washes to suggest the play of light on cascading water and carved stone, bringing a sense of movement and grandeur to the sheet. The composition features graceful figures of men and women set among trees, indicating a harmonious blend of sculpture, architecture, and nature typical of Enlightenment-era garden projects. Such presentation drawings allowed artists to communicate scale and narrative to patrons before costly stonework began. Today preserved in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints, the work offers visitors a rare glimpse into the creative process behind the monumental fountains that once animated French public spaces.

About the Artist

Augustin Pajou · 1730–1809

Augustin Pajou (1730–1809) was one of the foremost French sculptors of the second half of the eighteenth century, whose long and distinguished career bridged the Rococo grace of the Ancien Régime and the more sober classicizing spirit that emerged in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Born in Paris into a family with artistic connections — his father was an ornamental sculptor — Pajou showe...