What would Paris be without the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Cœur, as well as its Wallace Fountains, much more discreet but distributed in more than a hundred examples throughout the arrondissements.
These drinking water dispensers only quench thirst between March and November, but they characterize the cityscape all year round.
It is true that the occasional “Fontaine Wallace”, named after the British philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace (pronounced Wallace in Paris), can also be encountered elsewhere.
Few, however, are as unmistakably Parisian as the eight-foot-tall cast-iron ensembles of miniature architectural elements and sculpture.
It's worth taking a look: Four caryatids support an entablature with a canopy above a base and around the water jet and drain.
The differently shaped female figures in the Atlantean pose, with their arms raised and their heads stoically carrying their burdens, are dressed in antique, partly puckered robes that emphasize their contrapposto.
Her head fits into an Ionic capital that looks like ram's horns.
They personify both seasons and virtues such as simplicity, sobriety, kindness and charity.
Traditional fountain iconography is also present through individual motifs and decorations: reeds, shells, tridents and dolphins.
The first of the fountains, painted dark green and donated by Sir Wallace, was installed on Paris' Boulevard de la Villette on July 30, 1872 and connected to the drinking water network.
In our time, individual specimens were painted in bright colors.
But the resistance to the modernization frenzy of the city administration, which is also responsible for the Wallace fountain and is currently proceeding without taste or sense of form, is immense, and not just since the existence of a Society of the Wallace Fountains and the installation of an old original example in the garden of the city-historical Musée Carnavalet.
This year alone, it is having sixty of them overhauled and repainted - in the traditional colourway, which remains the favorite of the citizens - and is celebrating its 150th anniversary on September 24th and 25th.
In 1871 Queen Victoria bestowed the title of Baronet on him
Richard Jackson, who later called himself Wallace after his mother's maiden name, was born in London in 1818 but grew up in Paris.
Although inveterate bachelor Richard Seymour-Conway, known as Lord Hertford, had never acknowledged paternity over him, Wallace began to help him build an art collection in Paris and bid for it at auction.
Lord Hertford maintained a city apartment and acquired the Bagatelle estate on the Bois de Boulogne.
He died in 1870 in the eighteenth-century chateau with a large English garden.