TitleChildren of Deucalion
Artist
Lorado Taft
(1860 - 1936)
Daten.d.
MediumPlaster
DimensionsOverall: 19 1/2 × 19 3/4 × 18 1/2 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 2, 1912
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number120-S
Label TextThis plaster figural group is a model for a section of Taft's Fountain of Creation, conceived for the Midway in Chicago in 1909 or shortly before but left unfinished at Taft's death. The fountain was to have been a major component in a plan to beautify the mile-long strip of land originally laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead as part of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Taft established his studio nearby in 1906 and, traversing the Midway every day on his way to and from work, conceived of the idea of improving the grassy plot. His plan, announced in 1910, included rows of statues of the world's great idealists and three decorative bridges representing Science, Religion, and the Arts, spanning a lagoon or canal. Two huge fountains were to parenthetically enclose the space at either end. At the west end was The Fountain of Time, representing mankind as figures in various stages of life, caught up in a great wave (Time). It was completed in 1922.The Fountain of Creation was designed for the east end of the mall, and, if it had been completed, would have been about seventy feet long and forty feet high. It was to have represented the Greek myth of Pyrrha and Deucalion, the survivors of a great deluge not unlike the one that spared Noah and his family. The two lonely Titans, realizing their predicament and, one supposes, not wanting to wait for nature to take its course, asked an oracle how to quickly restore the human race. They were told to throw the bones of their mother behind them which they at first thought impossible. The clever Pyrrha, however, soon realized that the oracle meant the bones of Mother Earth and he promptly began throwing rocks and the like. Some rather tortured looking individuals, the ancestors of a new race of men and women, promptly sprang from the ground. Taft described the part of the myth he chose to depict:
"The sculptor shows us the moment when these stones, thus cast from the Titans' hands, are changing into men and women, rising out of the cold and flood into life and light. The composition begins with creatures half-formed, vague, prostrate, blindly emerging from the shapeless rock; continues at higher level with figures fully developed and almost erect, but still groping in darkness, struggling, wondering; and reaches its climax with an elevated group of human forms, complete and glorious, saluting the dawn." [Quoted in Ada Bartlett Taft, 35]
The Academy's plaster clearly shows part of this action. Three figures are represented, "blindly emerging from the shapeless rock." They were to have been placed on the monument at the viewer's left, one of three low groups of several crouching figures each, positioned at intervals across the front of the fountain.
Taft worked on models for all of the fountain figures, executing them first in plaster in sizes comparable to the Academy's work, and then enlarging them in the same medium, rethinking and adjusting the total composition many times over the last twenty-five years of his life. Nearly all of the individual components of the fountain had been enlarged by the time of Taft's death and several had been put into stone. A sketch model of Daughter of Pyrrha was cast in bronze in 1934 and is in the collection of Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina; and four full-scale limestone figures, Sons and Daughters of Deucalion and Pyrrha, are on the campus of the University of Illinois. One of these represents a shrouded female figure which also appears in the Academy's plaster. An unlocated maquette for the entire fountain, formerly in the collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana, is known from photographs.
The Academy's plaster, evidently the only surviving cast of this group as a whole, was accepted as Taft's diploma work in 1912, with the understanding that he would replace it with "a copy in marble or with some other work in that material" at a future date. That, however, never happened.
