Cleveland Museum of Art

No. 6: Fountain with Two Tritons Blowing Conch Shells

Date

c. 1736

Medium

etching and engraving

Culture

France, 18th century

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

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

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