Three Dolphin Fountain

Three Dolphin Fountain, 1922 (cast between 1923 and 1929)

Gaston Lachaise

Bronze
10 × 12 1⁄2 × 5 1⁄2 inches

Inscribed (on the front of the base): G. L./ ©/ 1922
Stamped (on the side of the base): ROMAN BRONZE WORKS N–Y–

Provenance

Kraushaar Galleries, New York.
The Lachaise Foundation, New York, from the above, 1969.
[with]Robert J. Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, from the above, 1985.
[with]Jeffrey Hoffeld and Company, New York, 1986.
The Rambach Collection, New Jersey, from the above, 1986.
Kraushaar Galleries, New York, from the above, 1999.
Private Collection, New York, from the above, 1999.

One of possibly three casts made during Lachaise’s lifetime.

Lachaise’s wall fountain representing three leaping dolphins expresses his love for animals and captures his sense of delight in watching them at play. The uppermost dolphin is piped to spout water.The sculpture was originally commissioned sometime after February 1922 by Charles Downing Lay (1877–1956), a noted landscape architect (and collector of sculptures by Lachaise), for the swimming pool at Lauxmont Farms, the estate of industrialist S. Forry Laucks (1870–1940) near Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. A bronze cast made in February 1923 is evidently the one commissioned by Lay for the pool, which was at the top level of a multi-tiered garden built by him for Laucks in that year.

Other casts of Three Dolphins (Fountain)have been recorded during Lachaise’s lifetime. One was loaned by John Kraushaar, owner of the C. W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, New York, to an exhibition of Lachaise’s sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago from December 22, 1925, to January 26, 1926. In 1927, Kraushaar ordered two more casts from the Roman Bronze Works, a New York foundry. He lent a cast for an exhibition of Lachaise’s art at the Philadelphia Art Alliance from October 27 to November 17, 1933.No other references are known until after Lachaise’s death in 1935. According to Lachaise’s widow (writing in about 1938), the collector Arthur F. Egner (1882–1943), the collector of a number of works by Lachaise, owned a cast; her statement has not been verified. A cast (perhaps the one made for Laucks) was acquired in 1940 by Charles Downing Lay from the Kraushaar Galleries, and is now unlocated. Other references to casts date from the 1940s onward. These later references evidently refer to the three recorded lifetime casts.Although the model for the sculpture is inscribed with the copyright date 1922, the copyright was not officially registered until January 31, 1928.The plaster model, badly damaged sometime before 1938, is owned by the Lachaise Foundation, New York, and no further casts can be made from it.

Exhibited

  • Dallas, Texas, PS Galleries, April 1985.
  • New York, Jeffrey Hoffeld and Company, Inc., Animals in American Sculpture, 1915–1950, April 18–May 31, 1986, no. 21.
  • New York, Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, American Modernism: The Françoise & Harvey Rambach Collection, September 30–November 20, 1999.

Literature

  • Jeffrey Hoffeld and Company, Inc. New York, Animals in American Sculpture, 1915–1950, exhibition checklist, New York: The Company, 1986, no. 21.
  • Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, American Modernism: The Françoise & Harvey Rambach Collection, exhibition catalogue, New York, N.Y.: The Gallery, 1999, p. 288.