The Fountain

Marseille, where Monticelli was born in 1824, was a city chronically short of water. It got by on roughly a litre per person a day, and when cholera came through in 1834 it killed more than 3,000 people there. Work began in 1839 on a canal to carry the Durance river some 80 kilometres across dry country, and the first water reached the city on 19 November 1849, when he was 25. Public fountains were where that water came out. The one on this panel is plain working stonework, a basin set against a wall in heavy shade, with small figures at the rim who are almost the same ochre as the stone behind them. He signed it at the lower left, low down in the dark.