No. 6: Fountain with Two Tritons Blowing Conch Shells (c. 1736): Art, History and Details

No. 6: Fountain with Two Tritons Blowing Conch Shells (c. 1736) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gabriel Huquier (French, 1695–1772); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

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

François Boucher’s design for a fountain presents an elaborate artistic fantasy with details drawn from mythology and the natural world. Two sea creatures, half-human and half-fish hybrids known as tritons, sit in a shell basin playing a pair of conchs. In the print, Gabriel Huquier transformed Boucher’s rocky grotto into a shell niche featuring the head of the sea god, also called Triton. These designs, though fanciful, reflect a wider Enlightenment interest in the collection and study of shells. In fact, French naturalist Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville even opened his scientific treatise on shells, La Conchyliologie, with a related print by Boucher.

Object facts

• Title: No. 6: Fountain with Two Tritons Blowing Conch Shells
• Date: c. 1736
• Creator attribution: Gabriel Huquier (French, 1695–1772); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching and engraving
• Dimensions: Image: 25.1 x 15.1 cm (9 7/8 x 5 15/16 in.); Platemark: 27.2 x 17.3 cm (10 11/16 x 6 13/16 in.); Sheet: 36 x 26.5 cm (14 3/16 x 10 7/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1952.518

A detail from the museum

In addition to his fame as an artist, Boucher was known by his contemporaries for his important collection of shells.

Collection credit

Gift of Erich Lederer

Further reading listed by the museum

• Landau, Ellen G. “‘A Fairytale Circumstance’ the Influence of Stage Design on the Work of François Boucher.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 70, no. 9 (November 1983): 360–378.

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.