Turtle Baby (c. 1910–16): Art, History and Details

Turtle Baby (c. 1910–16) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Edith Barretto Stevens Parsons (American, 1878–1956).

The work and its context

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

Parsons achieved renown through her garden sculptures of young children accompanied by animals, which one commentator praised for capturing “the happiness of just being alive.” In Turtle Baby, her most famous composition, the figure of the girl was modeled after her daughter. Conceived as a fountain, the sculpture has internal water conduits exiting the mouths of the four turtles circling its base.

Object facts

• Title: Turtle Baby
• Date: c. 1910–16
• Creator attribution: Edith Barretto Stevens Parsons (American, 1878–1956)
• Culture: America
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Overall: 104.2 cm (41 in.)
• Collection: American - Sculpture
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1923.724

A detail from the museum

Parsons created similar sculptures featuring young girls and boys with ducks, frogs, and fish.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Henry A. Everett for the Dorothy Burnham Everett Memorial Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Solender, Katherine. The American Way in Sculpture, 1890-1930. Cleveland, OH: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.
• W. M. M. "Contemporary American Bronzes." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 6, no. 10 (December 1919): 151-163.
• Gibson, Katherine. "'Michael, Rubens, and Some More of Us' In the Children’s Museum, Cleveland." The American Magazine of Art 15, no. 1 (1924): 707-10.

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.