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SCULPTURE OF THE MONTH #3

(Mystery Sculpture #2)

 Seligman Fountain, or the
Bear & Faun Fountain

Artist:.Edgar Walter
Executed ca. 1910

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Location, size, medium                                                                        Back to top

Bronze, 8 feet high. Located in Morningside Park, 114th St. and Morningside Ave., at the foot of the stairway (due west of the Lafayette and Washington statue on Morningside Ave.). Faces east; among trees, best viewed in the morning when the sun still hits it.

About the statue and the subject                                                          Back to top

A bear sprawls on an overhang, trying to stretch his paw far enough to reach the faun who huddles below it. This piece is a working fountain - the water comes out to the right of the faun, as we look at him in the photo above, and hundreds of hands resting there have rubbed the bronze to a high polish.

The sculpture was erected in memory of Alfred Lincoln Seligman, Vice-President of the National Highways Protective Association, who died in 1912 in an early automobile accident.

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•  Carl Schurz Monument, Upper Morningside Drive and 116th St. This one’s worth a visit for its spectacular view: to get there from the Bear and Faun, you climb a steep flight of stairs and end up on a promontory facing east. Schurz (1829-1906), born in Prussia, emigrated to the U.S. in 1852 and became a noted orator, military commander, politician and journalist.

•  Lafayette and Washington, 114th St. and Manhattan Ave., at Morningside Ave. An amazing piece of ineptitude by Bartholdi, who produced the Statue of Liberty. What was he thinking?

•  Robert F. Wagner, Terrace adjacent to the Robert F. Wagner, Sr., Houses, 120th St. and Second Ave. This is the Democratic Senator (1877-1953) who brought you the 1935 Wagner Act; a fellow Democrat noted that "The New Deal owed as much to Robert Wagner as to Franklin Roosevelt.” Wagner pushed particularly hard for the right of workers to bargain collectively through independent unions, for minimum standards for wages, hours, and working conditions, and for establishment of the Public Works Administration, which was to provide public jobs for the unemployed through deficit spending by the government, and thus, the theory ran, end the Depression by increasing consumption. (See the American National Biography, online or in print, for more on Wagner.)

They aim to make friends of the laboring classes -
           The trust of the people is sacred with them -
They swear that they're slaves to the will of the masses,
            They hem and they haw, and they haw and they hem;
They rave with a vehemence almost terrific,
            There isn't a doubt which they cannot dispel,
They revel in orgies of hope beatific -
            And serve us the buncombe we all know so well.
The old hokum buncombe,
The iron-clad buncombe,
            The moss-covered buncombe we all know so well.

(From “The Old Hokum Buncombe,” by Robert E. Sherwood, from The Norton Book of Light Verse pp. 197-8.)

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