The Archibald Fountain, Hyde Park
François-Léon Sicard never came. He modelled Apollo in his Paris studio and had the bronzes cast there by early May 1930, then never travelled to Australia to see them stand up in Hyde Park.
The commission was J. F. Archibald's doing and its terms were peculiar. He died on 10 September 1919 leaving part of his estate for "some beautiful bronze symbolic open-air memorial by a French artist" — French because he loved France, and because Australians and the French had fought alongside each other in the war. He would not name the sculptor himself. The will handed that choice to the president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in early August 1926 Sir Frank Dicksee settled on Sicard. Around £17,000 of Archibald's estate paid for what came back.
The figures are a programme rather than decoration. Apollo is the arts — beauty and light — with his arm thrown out across the water. Theseus killing the Minotaur is sacrifice for the public good, the spirit over the brute. Diana stands for peaceful nights and Pan for the good things of the earth, and six tortoises spout into the lower basin. Look for Apollo against the light with the Theseus group beneath him, and for the wind taking the spray off the archer's plinth while a man in a hat stands watching it.
It was inaugurated on 14 March 1932, five days before the Harbour Bridge opened, which is a hard week in which to be the new thing in town.
The stone is younger than the bronze. The Depression got at the budget, so the pedestals went up in synthetic granite and stayed that way until 1946, when the real material finally replaced them. In any photograph taken before that year, what Apollo is standing on is an imitation.
The water is younger still. Sicard meant the jets behind Apollo to rise in a fan — a sunburst for the god of the sun — and the fountain stopped doing it. Robert Woodward, fresh from the El Alamein fountain at Kings Cross, was commissioned in 1963 to redesign the lighting and the water, and put the fan back.
