Date : 1868
Material : Bronze
Acquisition : Gift of the city of New York (1873)
Fontaines et bassins
| Bethesda Fountain
Item 10 on 16
American Art
Sculpture (Fontaine)
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Bethesda Fountain is the central feature on the lower level of Bethesda Terrace overlooking The Lake in New York City's Central Park. The pool is centered by a fountain sculpture designed by Emma Stebbins in 1868 and unveiled in 1873. Stebbins was the first woman to receive a public commission for a major work of art in New York City. The bronze, eight-foot statue depicts a female winged angel touching down upon the top of the fountain, where water spouts and cascades into an upper basin and into the surrounding pool. Beneath her are four four-foot cherubs representing Temperance, Purity, Health, and Peace. Also called the Angel of the Waters, the statue refers to the Gospel of John, Chapter 5 where there is a description of an angel blessing the Pool of Bethesda, giving it healing powers. In Central Park the referent is the Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842, providing the city for the first time with a dependable supply of pure water: thus the angel carries a lily in one hand, representing purity, and with the other hand she blesses the water below. The base of the fountain was designed by the architect of all the original built features of Central Park, Calvert Vaux, with sculptural details, as usual, by Jacob Wrey Mould. In Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted's 1858 Greensward Plan, the terrace at the end of the Mall overlooking the naturalistic landscape of the Lake was simply called The Water Terrace, but after the unveiling of the angel, its name was changed to Bethesda Terrace.
The fountain, which had been dry for decades, was restored in its initial campaign, 1980-81, by the Central Park Conservancy as the centerpiece of its plan to renovate Central Park. The Terrace, designed by Vaux with sculptural decoration by Mould, was restored in the following season. Resodding, and fifty new trees, 3,500 shrubs and 3,000 ground cover plants followed in 1986.[1] Completion of the Minton encaustic tiles of the ceiling of the arcade between the flanking stairs were completed in 2007.
In the original "Greensward Plan", developed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architectural middle of the park was called "The Water Terrace," for its placement beside The Lake, but the area became known as Bethesda Terrace after the fountain was unveiled in 1873. At the unveiling ceremony, the artist's brochure quoted a Biblical verse from the Gospel of St. John: Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called... Bethesda...whoever then first after the troubling of the waters stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.
The fountain was designed and created by Emma Stebbins, who became the first woman to receive a sculptural commission in New York City when she was commissioned to create this fountain. It was designed and created in 1868, but wasn't unveiled until 1873, when the park was officially completed. In 1988 the Central Park Conservancy cleaned, repatinated, and sealed the fountain with a protective coating, and it's washed and waxed annually in order to preserve it. The fountain can be found in the middle of the park, on the north side of 72nd Street.
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda_Fountain
Text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
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