Model for the Tyler Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati

Among the high-rise office buildings surrounding Fountain Square, the Tyler Davidson Fountain stands as a reminder of Cincinnati’s nineteenth-century heritage. It is the city’s most widely recognized landmark. Henry Probasco commissioned the fountain in memory of Tyler Davidson, his brother-in-law and business partner. In 1865 Probasco traveled to Munich; there, at the Royal Bavarian Foundries of Ferdinand von Miller, he saw a drawing made twenty-five years earlier by sculptor August von Kreling. Probasco Objected to the moral poverty of the nymphs, sea gods, and mythological creatures of most fountain designs, Probasco admired von Kreling’s realistic vignettes of ordinary citizens engaged in water-related activities. The Genius of Waters surmounts the fountain, dispensing the precious resource to a daughter refreshing her aging father, a farmer waiting for rain, a mother and child about to bathe, and an artisan whose house is ablaze. Probasco believed that young working-class Cincinnatians would benefit by the fountain’s message that virtue brings reward.

Probasco was involved with the fountain at each step of production. This small-scale model was shipped to him from Munich and displayed in the library of his mansion in the Clifton neighborhood. At a celebration held there, Mayor Charles Wilstach proclaimed that Cincinnatians would be “the pioneers in the country of this mode of dispensing to our people the benefits of one of the great blessings of the earth.... Let us, in the erection of this magnificent fountain, signify that Cincinnati is destined to be not only the seat of learning and of literature, but of high art.”