When the philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace funded the eponymous drinking fountains for the city of Paris in 1872, he collaborated with French sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg, a native of Nantes, to bring his vision to life.
The fountains, designed in the aftermath of the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris to provide clean drinking water to the city’s inhabitants, soon became famous in France and abroad. The four caryatides supporting the dome, sculpted in a beautiful Renaissance style, became Lebourg’s masterpiece, representing kindness, simplicity, charity, and sobriety.
Today, when walking around Lebourg’s hometown of Nantes, some of the Wallace Fountains you’ll spot might seem unusual to those most familiar with his work. This is because, in 2024, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the original design, the tourism agency Le Voyage à Nantes commissioned comic-book artist Cyril Pedrosa to reinterpret four of them.
Known as l’Évasion, or “The Escape”, the fountains tell the story, in a very comic-like way, of the four women freeing themselves from the job assigned to them 150 years ago, by growing trees to carry the dome, climbing down them, and leaving their statues behind to escape their predetermined role.