Fontaine du Jardin du Luxembourg (grotte de Marie de Médécis) (c. 1850): Art, History and Details

Fontaine du Jardin du Luxembourg (grotte de Marie de Médécis) (c. 1850) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Charles Marville (French, 1813–1879).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This fountain was part of those gardens. Charles Marville, who specialized in photographing landscapes, architecture, and urban views, made this photograph four decades after the fountain’s 1811 restoration, which added the white marble statue of Venus bathing. If you go to Paris now, you will see the 1864 restoration, which radically restructured it and moved it 100 feet to make way for a street.

Object facts

• Title: Fontaine du Jardin du Luxembourg (grotte de Marie de Médécis)
• Date: c. 1850
• Creator attribution: Charles Marville (French, 1813–1879)
• Culture: France
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: Salted paper print, Blanquart-Évrard process
• Dimensions: Image: 20 x 15.9 cm (7 7/8 x 6 1/4 in.); Paper: 53.6 x 34.7 cm (21 1/8 x 13 11/16 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2021.65

A detail from the museum

In the 1620s, French queen Marie de’ Medici built an Italianate palace and gardens on Paris’s Left Bank.

Collection credit

Gift of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.