Fountain with Two Tritons Blowing Conch Shells (c. 1736): Art, History and Details

Fountain with Two Tritons Blowing Conch Shells (c. 1736) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

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

In this early chalk drawing, François Boucher combined plants, dolphins, rocks, shells, and tritons (mythological creatures that are part man and part fish) into a design that was meant to suggest a fountain in a rocky garden grotto. This sheet represents l'art rocaille, or "rock and shell art," a style of ornament that developed in France during the 1730s and featured decorative compositions with abundant detail. The image was one of seven that the printmaker Gabriel Huquier translated as etchings around the time Boucher completed them. These reproductions helped to bring Boucher's work to a broader audience, including other artists who emulated his style.

Object facts

• Title: Fountain with Two Tritons Blowing Conch Shells
• Date: c. 1736
• Creator attribution: François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Black chalk with stumping, and red chalk, heightened with white chalk on beige laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 37.7 x 22.2 cm (14 13/16 x 8 3/4 in.); Secondary Support: 39.6 x 24.2 cm (15 9/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1952.529

A detail from the museum

While translating this drawing into etching, the printmaker Gabriel Huquier replaced Boucher's grotto setting with an architectural niche.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Michel, André. François Boucher. Paris: L'Édition d'Art, H. Piazza et Cie, 1906.
• "Accessions of American and Canadian Museums, April - June 1953." Art Quarterly 16, no. 4 (Winter 1953): 346-365.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.