For four years a two-story metal shed covered much of Lorado Taft’s masterpiece Fountain of Time, the massive cast-concrete sculpture that’s occupied the west end of the Midway Plaisance in Hyde Park since 1922. But this fall the huge shed was finally torn down, and the public could see the results of the most extensive artwork renovation in the city’s history.
Lorado Taft is known primarily for his monumental heroic sculptures. Many of his 40-odd major works are in parks and public buildings in Chicago and around the state, but he also received commissions for statues, sculptures, and fountains that still stand in other cities around the country, from Washington, D.C., to Seattle and Indianapolis to Vicksburg, Mississippi.
According to Timothy Garvey’s Public Sculptor: Lorado Taft and the Beautification of Chicago, Taft sought funding for his ambitious project from the city’s South Park board of commissioners. They were positive but cautious, so he turned to the Art Institute’s Ferguson Fund, which had been set up by lumber magnate Benjamin F. Ferguson. Money in the fund, Ferguson’s will stipulated, was to be spent on “the erection and maintenance of enduring statuary and monuments…in the parks, along the boulevards, or in other public places within the City of Chicago, Illinois, commemorating worthy men and women of America, or important events in American History.” In 1907 Taft had received the first Ferguson commission, Fountain of the Great Lakes, which was installed outside the Art Institute and dedicated in 1913 (it’s now at the southwest corner of the museum).
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The Ferguson administrators liked Taft’s Midway plan, but they agreed to fund only his Fountain of Time, giving him the commission in 1913. They saw the sculpture as a way to commemorate the century of peace between England and the U.S. that began with the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812.
In 1921 Taft turned to John Joseph Earley, an engineer based in Washington, D.C., who’d developed an inexpensive new material for architectural decoration–a pebble-finish, steel-reinforced, hollow-cast concrete. Earley was eager to have his material used in such a large project, and he sent Taft samples of numerous aggregates for the finishing coat. Taft decided on a buff-colored ground quartz gravel from the Potomac River because it would make the sculpture look less like concrete.
The first repairs were made in the mid-30s. But the money came from the city, not the Ferguson Fund, even though the fund had been established in part to pay for maintenance. By 1932 it had financed ten public sculptures around the city and two inside the Art Institute. But then the museum began planning a major expansion, and because the Depression made fund-raising difficult, administrators began looking for new sources of cash. In 1933 they quietly petitioned the Circuit Court of Cook County to decide whether the word “monument” in Ferguson’s will could mean a building, specifically a museum addition for statuary and other artworks. The court said it could. For the next 23 years the fund’s income was allowed to simply accumulate–no sculptures were commissioned, and no repairs were financed.
By the early 80s there was a renewed appreciation for beaux arts sculpture around the country, and Illinois art historians were trying to rescue Taft from obscurity. Chicago has lots of his works (at the Art Institute, at the Garfield Park Conservatory, at Graceland Cemetery, at Wacker and Wabash), and more can be found across the state (in Danville, Elmwood, Oregon, Quincy, Urbana). In 1983 there was a retrospective at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a few books on his work followed. By then Art Institute and city staff had realized that there was little time left to save Fountain of Time, which Robert Jones, director of the Art Institute’s department of design and construction, calls “the most important fountain in the city outside of the Buckingham.”
