There were several fountains in Chelyabinsk before the October Revolution, but they were perched mainly on the premises of private estates. It was not until the first decade of the 20th century that a fountain appeared in a public space. It was located in the public city garden (now the Pushkin City Garden). The decorative composition was installed in 1909–1910. It was the first and only sculpture on the streets of pre-revolutionary Chelyabinsk.
The townspeople would come to the public city garden to listen to the symphony orchestra concerts. The orchestra consisted of conservatory students, who came to the city on their summer break. The summer theater staged classic Russian and foreign musicals, as well as plays by William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy. On Sundays, the public could pay to attend large-scale open-air events with popular salon dances, serpentine streamers, and confetti.
The sculpture depicted a boy and a girl hiding under an umbrella. Jets of water would be falling over it, creating the impression that the children were sheltering from the rain. The umbrella has not survived to this day.
The boy is standing to the right of the girl, his hand on her shoulders. He is wearing a shirt with rolled-up sleeves and short pants. The girl is clad in an apron dress and a wide-brim hat with a scarf around its crown. She is holding a folded umbrella and a small purse behind her back, in her left hand. The sculpture’s plinth had been attached to a cast-iron conical base with arc-shaped cutouts on four sides. Inside it was a powerful electric light bulb. It illuminated the water splashes with green, red, blue, and yellow light through colored semaphore glass.
In 1953, the sculpture was dismantled as an element of the “old bourgeois culture, ” after which it lay in a warehouse for a long time. In 1983, it was transferred for permanent storage to the Chelyabinsk State Museum of History and Local Lore. This sculpture is believed to have been one of many since similar compositions had been used in other cities of the Russian Empire: Ufa, Gurzuf, Orenburg, Samara, and Sarapul.
On August 6, 2001, a bronze copy of the pre-revolutionary sculpture, made using a wax replica, was installed in the Pushkin City Garden. The original sculpture was exhibited in the Center for Architecture in September 2002, and in the summer of 2008, it joined the permanent exhibition of the Chelyabinsk State Museum of History and Local Lore.
The townspeople would come to the public city garden to listen to the symphony orchestra concerts. The orchestra consisted of conservatory students, who came to the city on their summer break. The summer theater staged classic Russian and foreign musicals, as well as plays by William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy. On Sundays, the public could pay to attend large-scale open-air events with popular salon dances, serpentine streamers, and confetti.
The sculpture depicted a boy and a girl hiding under an umbrella. Jets of water would be falling over it, creating the impression that the children were sheltering from the rain. The umbrella has not survived to this day.
The boy is standing to the right of the girl, his hand on her shoulders. He is wearing a shirt with rolled-up sleeves and short pants. The girl is clad in an apron dress and a wide-brim hat with a scarf around its crown. She is holding a folded umbrella and a small purse behind her back, in her left hand. The sculpture’s plinth had been attached to a cast-iron conical base with arc-shaped cutouts on four sides. Inside it was a powerful electric light bulb. It illuminated the water splashes with green, red, blue, and yellow light through colored semaphore glass.
In 1953, the sculpture was dismantled as an element of the “old bourgeois culture, ” after which it lay in a warehouse for a long time. In 1983, it was transferred for permanent storage to the Chelyabinsk State Museum of History and Local Lore. This sculpture is believed to have been one of many since similar compositions had been used in other cities of the Russian Empire: Ufa, Gurzuf, Orenburg, Samara, and Sarapul.
On August 6, 2001, a bronze copy of the pre-revolutionary sculpture, made using a wax replica, was installed in the Pushkin City Garden. The original sculpture was exhibited in the Center for Architecture in September 2002, and in the summer of 2008, it joined the permanent exhibition of the Chelyabinsk State Museum of History and Local Lore.
