Fontaine du Jardin du Luxembourg (grotte de Marie de Médécis)

c. 1850

Fontaine du Jardin du Luxembourg (grotte de Marie de Médécis), c. 1850. Charles Marville (French, 1816–1879). Salted paper print, Blanquart-Évrard process; image: 20 x 15.9 cm (7 7/8 x 6 1/4 in.); paper: 53.6 x 34.7 cm (21 1/8 x 13 11/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg 2021.65 This fountain was part of those gardens. Charles Marville, who specialized in photographing landscapes, architecture, and urban views, made this photograph four decades after the fountain’s 1811 restoration, which added the white marble statue of Venus bathing. If you go to Paris now, you will see the 1864 restoration, which radically restructured it and moved it 100 feet to make way for a street. In the 1620s, French queen Marie de’ Medici built an Italianate palace and gardens on Paris’s Left Bank.