Style, Influence, and Epoch: Beaux-Arts and "City Beautiful"

In addition to Beaux-Arts influences, though, another epochal style—the “City Beautiful” movement—is important to understanding the artistic context of the Fountain’s creation. The excitement produced by movements such as Beaux-Arts and the “American Renaissance” inspired plans for the redevelopment of American cities. Amidst this fervor, the “City Beautiful” movement emerges with the promise of using:

"…planning, architecture, and public art as a means to engender morality amongst a wider urban public that was increasingly foreign-born or otherwise alien in the eyes of established elites. This period thus saw the growth of a number of philanthropic institutions and organizations—e.g., museums, libraries, settlement houses—that sought to render the American public into an assimilated, relatively well-educated, and homogeneous whole."[16]

In more concrete terms, the movement brought a heightened intentionality to the planning and landscaping of public spaces—including populating such spaces with monuments, statuary, and sculpture that emphasized the role and “necessity of art within urban environs.”[17] The Bajnotti’s Fountain’s conceptual heritage in “City Beautiful” is readily apparent when one attends to statement made by Yandell and other key players about the memorial’s intended role in Rhode Island’s capital city. As Harper’s reported: “[The Fountain] will stand in the centre of the parkway, opposite the new passenger station, at Providence, of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railway, and, as its designer says. ‘It must be so fine that its fame will make persons stop over a train to have a look at it.’”[18] The Providence Journal similarly emphasizes the touristic value of the memorial and its proximity to the bustling train station, writing: “The fountain designed by Miss Yandell, which is to occupy a position in the centre of the parkway in front of the new passenger station, is a work that cannot fail to attract the attention of visitors to Providence, as well as residents of the city.”[19]